Hello Kurt, all, Please assign a CVE for grub-mkconfig. grub-mkconfig on Debian and derivatives sets mode 444 on grub.cfg configuration files if there are no plaintext passwords in the configuration file. However, the permissions are still set world readable if the password_pbkdf2 directive includes a hashed password. The original bug report and proposed patch is by Francesco Poli: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=632598 Original compressed patch: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?msg=5;filename=safer_grub_cfg_perms.diff.gz;att=1;bug=632598 Patch, uncompressed and inlined: diff -ruN a/grub-mkconfig b/grub-mkconfig --- a/grub-mkconfig 2011-05-31 11:33:31.000000000 +0200 +++ b/grub-mkconfig 2011-07-03 21:15:53.000000000 +0200 @@ -293,7 +293,7 @@ esac done -if [ "x${grub_cfg}" != "x" ] && ! grep -q "^password " ${grub_cfg}.new ; then +if [ "x${grub_cfg}" != "x" ] && ! grep -q "^password" ${grub_cfg}.new ; then chmod 444 ${grub_cfg}.new || true fi