The new Ubuntu 21.04 will be the new version of the operating system that will arrive in the spring of this year, specifically at the end of April. This new update will bring standard support (not extended, as it is not LTS) of 9 months, and, little by little, it will shape the next LTS that will reach users in April 2022. Among all the changes we can find in Hirsute Hippo , one of the ones that caught our attention the most is this change in the default permissions of this Linux. A change that will make all folders, from now on, much more private.
New Ubuntu default permissions
Many users of this distro have been complaining for more than a decade that the default permissions of this Linux are too open. Until now, when we create a new user in Ubuntu, or a new personal folder, the default permissions of the directory is 755. This means that:
- The user himself has permission to read, write and execute.
- Group users can read and execute.
- Other users can read and execute.
On the Canonical distro, this has always been the case. If our Linux is only used by one person, it does not affect us too much. But if we have a multi-user system, it can pose a danger to our security and privacy. Any user could open our directory and have access to all our data. You will not be able to create new files or delete existing ones, but otherwise you have no restrictions.
As of the release of the new Ubuntu version, 21.04, these permissions will change by default and will become 750 . This implies that:
- The user himself has permission to read, write and execute.
- Group users can read and execute.
- Other users cannot do anything, not even view the files.
This change was proposed by the community several months ago. And, since there have been no complaints about it, Canonical has decided to implement it in its operating system. With this change, Ubuntu will be a little more secure, resembling the degree of security and privacy to that of other Linux distros that, as standard, have much more restrictive permissions.
Change Linux permissions
Of course, if we don’t like these new permissions because they are too open, or on the contrary, because they are too restricted, we can always change them manually. The only thing we will need is to have access to the root user to be able to execute the chmod command that allows us to modify these rwx permissions.
To do this, we will invoke the “chmod” command , followed by the value, in octal, of the permissions we want to give it, and lastly the directory to which we want to apply these changes. For example, we can give full read, write and execute permission for all users to a supposed user folder called “softzone” with the command:
sudo chmod 777 softzone
We can also do the reverse, for example, allow only the owner of the folder to have access to it, blocking access to everyone else (group users and the rest) with:
sudo chmod 700 softzone
With these commands it does not matter the permissions that our Linux distro brings by default, we can quickly specify the ones we want.
