How can you prevent users from leaving a directory?

chroot, and override exit with an alias,could work

ls -lah

How can you prevent a shutdown using a power key?

You can't, lol. Think it's just a joke

You could probably install a handler for the event that's triggered when the power button is pressed. Most OSes do that and pop up a graceful shutdown options window. Most hardware will have a hard shutdown option when you hold the power button for a few seconds. You would probably have to overwrite the BIOS or something at that level to prevent that way out.

ctrl-D

There's an Emacs command to do that

C-x M-c M-minefield

You could also just unplug it.

I can think of a way out:

Just throw the whole PC away. It's someone else's problem now!

AFAIK, there’s no way to without modifying the system tools and shell.

Does it have a perpetual energy source if I unplug it?

Combat the minefield with a fork bomb. Ain’t no process surviving this engagement.

Does it fry my hardware? Or can I just do another fresh install

\cd ~

i had a school colleague who could write small programs in bytecode, so i think someone who really knows their shit can get out without issues with cat and ls, as long as there isn't much obfuscation

Maybe something like find ./ -type f | xargs md5sum, then avoid the one directory where the executable has a different checksum. Heck, even find | ls might suffice.

When people don't know normal things we learned in '92, I get worried.

There was an old virus that would copy your FAT table to ram, erase it from disk, and preset you with a slot machine UI where you would gamble to get the FAT back, if you won, great, the virus would write the FAT back to the drive, if not, you lost everything.

Rebooting without playing meant loosing everything.

But that just becomes a Jumanji issue

But it's on a dedicated server you have already paid for, which also hosts your own Minecraft game server with active players (mission-critical process which can never be allowed to stop).

Encrypt hard drive and keep the key in RAM. Could be recovered with a cold boot attack but that's very advanced. The DOS virus ONEHALF would run as a daemon encrypring a block on the drive on each boot and intercept reads/writes to the encrypted part as if nothing ever happened. Only after encrypting ½ of the disk, it would reveal itself with an ominous

Dis is one half.
Press any key to continue...

The decryption was eventually cracked by ESET and they developed a tool to recover the drive.

Based on the responses in this thread, I feel like you could present this screenshot with a "I bet you couldn't find your way out of this!" and a zip of the directory, and a significant number of users would voluntarily download it and extract it just to "prove that they could".

If you are using KDE

This could be trivially defeated by a program which erases the hard drive unless run using a particular executable name. Then, all twenty entries could simply be hard links to the same executable file on disk, but one of the names would trigger different behavior.

Genuinely my first response. What are VMs for?

alt+sysrq+b bypasses this handler, also switching to another vt should just drop you in a normal shell it as well as long the login shell isn't modified. There are a lot of ways that can be used to break out.

I wonder if we could bash -n -v the source code? 🤔 Since -n should error check without execution.

Edit: maybe that only works on scripts?

FAT Table

Can I just pay? I can go to the ATM Machine and enter my PIN Number

They never guess the next move: Unplugs pc

You forget that FAT stands for "File Allocation Travesty."

cat 1

Magic, I guess, 'cause nothing in the sceenshot would do it, unless the attacker had already replaced cat with a trojan or something.

loud knocking on the door

Diabolical!

Reminds me of gameshell, which is a rogue-like game designed to teach you the unix shell. So instead of navigating with NESW, you cd to locations. At one point you search the "garden", which is an unmanageable tangle of directories, with find.

Reminder that binaries cannot change a shell's working directory, so the non-mines will do nothing.

(cd is a shell builtin)

strings 1

I run QubesOS BTW. My entire computer is just a bunch of VMs in a trench coat.

Either that or the PC keeps running anyway.

Has "let's play a game" vibes

Well yeah? And you do it in a vm. But seems like a decently simple problem anyway. ls -al and compare the sizes.

So then you either cat the executable and hope it’s a shell script, you output the binary with a hex viewer and compare, you modify the executable so it’s in a lower permission group and thus wouldn’t have access to erase the drive, there’s like a hundred ways to solve this.

Good point. Also it wouldn’t stop you from just opening another terminal window haha.

Technically they could if run as root by modifying the parent process

it could just reinvoke $SHELL in the parent dir

what does this change?

The power cable would like to have a word.

Running Qubes as a daily driver is some serious level of privacy enthusiasm