🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1fvngjINN297@iraul1.ira.uka.de> s_titz@ira.uka.de (Olaf Titz) writes:
   In article <Byr9qE.24p@dscomsa.desy.de> Hallam@zeus02.desy.de writes:
   >This is my grip against UNIX. You can either have a secure system or you can
   >have a useful system. You can't have both at present.

   My experience shows that this is not a UNIX problem, it is a general
   problem. Even an operating system stuffed with 'security' facilities
   like VMS is likely to stop legitimate use, if you turn on all those things.

The main job of security is to say "NO".  
The main job of Unix is to say "Yes".
The other main job of security is to keep track of who did what to what,
	so that if you decide the system *should* have said no, but didn't,
	you know what got stolen.
The other main job of Unix is not to waste your time with all this detail
	about who did what to what - the normal say to indicate sucess
	is silence.
Yes, there are some conflicts :-)

The main problems with security on Unix, and on many other systems, 
are that sometimes the easiest way to get a job done is loses track of
the identity or privileges of the real user, which takes some work
to fix if you *know* the identity of the real user, 
and that sometimes it's genuinely hard to know who the real user is,
especially across a network where you don't control the other end.
One way to resolve the latter problem is to always trust the user;
another way is to never trust the user; a middle way is to work hard
and try to give you some control about how much trust you have.

The Orange Book takes the don't-trust-them way, and loses capabilities.
Unix falls in the middle way, and sometimes gets it wrong.
MS-DOS knows there is only One User in the Universe, and She can do 
what She wants, so it's perfectly secure in the Great Cloud of Unknowing :-)

(Then of course, there are bugs and misfeatures, and the relative
quantities of these in Unix vs. other OS's is beyond the scope of this note :-)
But it is a lot easier to do security, and everything else,
if your system has a clean model of reality behind its design.
Tacked-on stuff never does as well, and many of the nice tools on Unix
really were afterthoughts.
--
#				Pray for peace;      Bill
# Bill Stewart 908-949-0705 wcs@anchor.att.com AT&T Bell Labs 4M312 Holmdel NJ
# Nov 12 - Anniversary of Indonesian massacre in East Timor, 1991
# Indonesia first invaded in 1975, and about 1/3 of the people have been killed.