Tag Guard

Security Anti-Pattern: MLS for Guards

This article was requested, and was a long time coming anyway. I’ve gone over Multi-Level Security (MLS) a little bit before. It’s basically a security policy that is implemented by many trusted operating systems (such as Trusted Solaris) that is hierarchical and inflexible by nature. Specifically Bell-LaPadula (BLP) is used by many operating systems because it reflects the real world security policy used by the government and military. In BLP subjects and objects have a label consisting of a level (Secret, Top Secret, Unclassified, etc) and a set of non-hierarchical categories (US Only, Army, etc).