What could have been done differently?

Wed Jan 29 18:47:30 UTC 2003

On Tue, 28 Jan 2003, Scott Francis wrote:

  He argued instead that OSes should be redesigned to implement the
  principle of least privilege from the ground up, down to the
  architecture they run on.

[...]

  The problem there is the same as with windowsupdate - if one can spoof the
  central authority, one instantly gains unrestricted access to not one, but
  myriad computers.

[...]

  So far, the closest thing I've seen to this concept is the ssh
  administrative host model: adminhost:~root/.ssh/id_dsa.pub is
  copied to every targethost:~root/.ssh/authorized_keys2, such that
  commands can be performed network-wide from a single station.

Do you even read what you write? How does a host with root access to
an entire set of hosts exemplify the least privilege principle?

matto

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