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Should a wheel user that was created to disable root login and secure SSH have the same ownership as root from a security point of view?

Adam Alleman
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No.

Modern Unix systems use user groups to control access privileges. The wheel group is a special user group used on some Unix systems to control access to the su command, which allows a user to masquerade as another user (usually the super user).

Alejandro F.
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  • Uhm… on Berkeley Unix, `wheel` is just gid 0, but there’s no corresponding uid (well there is, it’s just `root`). This answer is wrong, but the question itself is… I’d say bad. I don’t get what he wants to ask. – mirabilos Dec 05 '21 at 21:35
  • @mirabilos I think the OP is asking about Linux. AFAIK most Linux distros have a `root` group with GID 0, and a separate `wheel` (or sometimes `sudo`) group that controls access to `sudo`. – anonymoose Dec 05 '21 at 23:10
  • Ah, I know of that as `sudo` group (on BSD, the `wheel` group indeed does both `su` and `sudo`). Thanks for clearing up. – mirabilos Dec 06 '21 at 04:50