Secure Coding mailing list archives
Re: SC-L-DIGEST V1 #37
From: Ken Goldman <kgold () watson ibm com>
Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2004 19:57:38 +0000
Back in the late 1980's, Apollo Computer (later bought by HP) had an OS called Aegis. It had, as I recall, 21 different specifiers, plus inheritance, and they changed meaning for files and directories. It was everything you could think of. OTOH, the resulting security was awful. We had their systems in our CAD department, and no one could spend months figuring out what the ACL's should be. The obvious solution was to set "everybody, everything" so we could get our work done. Perhaps for a huge system with a big, trained support staff, good auditing tools, etc., this made sense. But I think adding the flexibility without extensive tools is doomed. To me Unix does a pretty good job of trading off features vs. usability for the average user.
I'm working on an extensible access-control-list style authorization system, beyond the usual read/write authorization schemes, probably to be written as a Perl module for CGI use and using a database on the back end.
-- Ken Goldman [EMAIL PROTECTED] 914-784-7646
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- Re: SC-L-DIGEST V1 #37 Ken Goldman (Feb 27)