Ah, ok, I see now - we haven't gotten as far as one facing the internet
- although I do hear that that's in phase 2 of one apps plans for this
year.  I'll have to get you involved in that project :)


Marcy Cortes


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-----Original Message-----
From: Linux on 390 Port [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of
Alan Altmark
Sent: Friday, February 10, 2006 8:49 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [LINUX-390] VSWITCH authorizations (was: First install of
RedHat under z/VM)

On Friday, 02/10/2006 at 06:55 CST, Marcy Cortes
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I guess I don't see anyone breaking into the class G guest if the 
> class G guest doesn't a password and is logon by only by the systems 
> programmers with her password.  I guess in theory they could somehow 
> get to cp by linux, but then he'd already have the NIC anyway.

If you have only one VSWITCH defined, then the risk is obviously minor.
But what if you had two VSWITCHes, one that faced the Internet and
another that faced your intranet?  The risk of breakin may be low, but
the consequences of the Linux guest connecting to both VSWITCHes without
your explicit permission would be significant.  It would be like giving
some distributed server access to a trunk port on a switch with
authorization to all VLANs.  <shudder>

But I appreciate that in non-security-conscious environments the
RESTRICTED nature of a VSWITCH can be annoying.  But maybe it's only
annoying because it is easy to forget to authorize the access?

A final thought...  The best security controls are in an ESM.  You can
lay your system bare if that's what you want to do.  That is to say, an
ESM provides not only extra security, but extra non-security if so
configured.
 With RACF, a single generic profile could be defined with UACC(UPDATE),
allowing every user on the system to connect to any Guest LAN or
VSWITCH.

Philosophy #37: It should be HARD to get your system into a wide-open
state.  No accidental tourists.  In fact, security standards are moving
in the direction of requiring *two* privileged users to deactivate the
security controls.  (You know, both have to insert and turn their keys
at the same time.)

Alan Altmark
z/VM Development
IBM Endicott

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