Linux Security Concepts

Internal

• Linux Security Concepts

Privileged Process

Traditional UNIX implementations distinguish two categories of processes for the purpose of performing permission checks: privileged processes and unprivileged processes. A privileged process is a process with its effective user ID is 0, referred to as superuser or root. Privileged processes bypass all kernel permission checks.

Unprivileged Process

An unprivileged process is a process with a non-zero its effective user ID. Unprivileged processes are subject to full permission checking based on the process' credentials: effective UID, effective GID and supplementary group list.