Rethinking Unix Security: Why giving users root is not always such a
bad thing
Traditional security principles such as the principle of least
privilege, and separation of duties have been the mainstay of Unix
security since its inception. However, there are many circumstances in
which the risk of not users not being able to perform a `privileged'
action far outweigh the risk of them breaching security. This talk
will introduce the concept of Optimistic security and give some
practical examples of how to implement such as a scheme for a standard
Unix System.
Speaker Bio:
Dean Povey is a research scientist with the Distributed Systems Technology
Centre (DSTC). He has published several papers in the fields of distributed
systems security, PKI and access control; and has over eight years experience
in the IT field as a researcher, software engineer, and systems administrator.
He is one of the principal authors of the security toolkits Oscar and uPKI
and has contributed to both Australian and International standards in the
area of PKI.