Alle 13:55, sabato 6 marzo 2004, Lamar Owen ha scritto:
> On Friday 05 March 2004 03:34 pm, scott.marlowe wrote:
> > Sorry, but that's the wrong answer.  Once someone has root on a unix box
> > her can do ANYTHING he wants.  and he can cover his tracks.
>
> This is what things like the capabilities system and SELinux are designed
> to prevent in the Linux world.  As Fedora Core 2 will ship with SELinux
> installed and enabled, it will become much more difficult for someone to
> randomly get root and do damage.  It is quite simple with SELinux to
> prevent any of the attacks you mentioned.  Root is no longer root.  Things
> on an SELinux system, or a system fully implementing the kernel
> capabilities model, can indeed be locked away from root, at least in
> network attached multiuser mode.  This does, of course, make maintenance of
> the data more difficult; one must be at the console in a special mode to do
> full maintenance.  But someone remotely cracking root no longer is the
> threat they once were, when some system like SELinux is in use.

A better, more structured architecture of permissions on Unix is a 
long-standing need. It looks like SELinux is offering a new and interesting 
approach to this problem.

Regarding this topic I have a dream: the hyerarchical permission architecture 
of OS/400 (and many other IBM OSs for mainframe) ported to Linux. Just imagine 
this: you have a omnipotent "root" who can access the machine from the 
console only, a whole set of powerful, configurable administrators who can 
act from the net, each of them devoted to administer a specific part of the 
OS or of the File System, and finally a crowd of simple users, with 
configurable permissions. Nobody would have more power of what it actually 
need for his job, not even the root.

Would not it be a better (safer and more manageable) world to live on?

-----------------------------------------
Alessandro Bottoni and Silvana Di Martino
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

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