Processes that should belong to Root

[Zener`]

I apologize if this has been asked before but a search didn't come up with anything related to my question.

I was reading a book on Linux Security. It mentioned it wasn't especially safe to have processes running as root unless necessary. My question is, what processes should be run as root? Also, how would I go about changing a processes owner?

[daark.child]

In what context was this mentioned because some processes can only be run by root.

[Zener`]

I can't find the exact place I saw it, but I remember it saying that running processes with root access made obtaining root access that much easier. I want to find out which processes *need* to be run as root and which can be ran in some other, more secure, fashion.

[daark.child]

Most distros are already preconfigured in such a way that processes that do not need to be run as root, are run by some other user (enter "ps aux" in the CLI and take a look). Its usually server apps and daemons that are run using a dedicated system user who is not root.

[Zener`]

I was just wondering because I had a look at my running processes and 56 of them belonged to root. Is that a normal number?

[daark.child]

I currently have 45 processes that belong to root, so its not unusual to have a lot of processes being owned by root. Like I said apart from servers and other daemons, many system processes are started or run by root.

[valan]

There's quite a few that can't be run by a non root user, but many things can and should be. Look up info on specific programs (identifiied by the process name) to see if it can be and how to go about doing it.

[Zener`]

Ok, its good to know that I am not putting my machine at a huge risk by having a large number of processes running as root and I'll have a look at the individual processes as valan suggested.

Thanks