🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <WCS.92Dec13203554@rainier.ATT.COM> wcs@anchor.ho.att.com (Bill Stewart +1-908-949-0705) writes:
>
>The main job of security is to say "NO".  
>The main job of Unix is to say "Yes".

O.K., you agree in this point: The main job of Unix is to get the
user's work done.
The main job of security is to stop the user from getting his work
done.

=> "Security" as defined such belongs on the crap heap and not in
computers that are to be USED, imho.

>The other main job of security is to keep track of who did what to what,

To spy on the users.

>	so that if you decide the system *should* have said no, but didn't,
>	you know what got stolen.

But then it is too late and you have caught a bug, perhaps, but not
the intruder, according to your 'security' definition.

(And, mentioning that word reminds me of the following: The sometimes
arbitrary redefinition of an otherwise legitimate user as 'intruder'
makes me at least raise an eyebrow.)

>...
>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,

Do you ever know who the 'real' user is...

>especially across a network where you don't control the other end.

...even on your local machine?

>One way to resolve the latter problem is to always trust the user;

That from *you*? ;-)

>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.
>
>(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 :-)

Simply that Unix doesn't have more bugs than other OSs does in no way
invalidate the statement that it doesn't have as much *features* to
stop legitimate use. Take VMS, for example. Maybe there are less bugs
in it. (Yes, it has bugs, too.) But definitely there are features in
it that serve nobody but paranoid system admins who want to control
every key any user may press, at the expense of memory and CPU time
that otherwise could serve the user. Now tell me what is better ;-)

>But it is a lot easier to do security, and everything else,

Security, as defined above, means unusability - for this I don't need
any OS at all. I switch the machine off.

>if your system has a clean model of reality behind its design.

To define 'reality' is not that easy...

>Tacked-on stuff never does as well, and many of the nice tools on Unix
>really were afterthoughts.

Many of the not-so-nice tools, too.

Olaf
-- 
| Olaf Titz - comp.sc.student  |   o     | uknf@dkauni2.bitnet | old address |
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