Greetings, I have some security-related questions; admittedly of a rather elemental nature. I hope that is not a problem.
The first question I wanted to ask, is what is the opinion of people on this list, concerning an ideal umask for general use? I have not changed the root umask on my own system, but for my own use, after some research on the Web and my own thinking, changed the umask of my unpriveleged account to 077. Do people here actually consider that too extreme, or is it appropriate? I also wanted to ask people here, for information about the preferred configuration of sudo. After again attempting to investigate on the Web, my own sudo configuration currently has four credentials; username, unique (non-wheel) group name, machine address, and password. Is that a reasonably secure setup, or is there something more than that, which some of you usually do? My third question is a little more sensitive. I have read about claims in the media recently that there may not be any form of cryptography in existence which is unbreakable by...certain parties. Given that I am less than a novice in the subject myself, I wanted to ask if there were any particularly robust algorithms that could be recommended for keeping certain files private. My thanks in advance.
