Archive for the 'Security' Category

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Security Anti-Pattern: Status Quo Encapsulation

Posted by: Joshua Brindle on March 25th, 2006

First a clarification: in my last post I said that least privilege is the ultimate goal of most MAC advocates but that isn’t entirely true, I accidentally ignored a large portion of MAC advocates (mostly those that predate me!). There are several different models which are commonly implemented and thought to be correct. In the government industry that model is Multi Level Security (MLS) and is in no way least privilege, but that is another topic altogether. In the civilian sector status quo encapsulation is a popular model to implement, which is what I’ll be talking about today.

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The Myth of Least Privilege (or why we love equivalence classes)

Posted by: Joshua Brindle on March 23rd, 2006

Just about any Mandatory Access Control (MAC) advocate will tell you that their ultimate security goal is least privilege. Least privilege has become a metaphorical holy grail in the security industry. Least privilege, in its unadulterated form is giving each user, process and so on the exact access it needs and no more.

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