At 9:32 PM -0800 11/25/08, Brian Chess wrote: > Larry, I'm not sure I get your meaning. You say you don't think it's a >dry well, but then you say programmers ignore the privilege management >facilities at their disposal.
I mean they ignore it until security overseers (800.53a, PCI DSS, 8500.2 evaluators) come by and force them to fix it. > At 10:57 AM -0800 11/25/08, Andy Steingruebl wrote: >> On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 9:48 AM, Gunnar Peterson >><<<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>[EMAIL PROTECTED]>mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>[EMAIL >>PROTECTED]> >>wrote: >> >> >> but actually the main point of my post and the one i would like to >> hear people's thoughts on - is to say that attempting to apply >> principle of least privilege in the real world often leads to drilling >> dry wells. i am not blaming any group in particular i am saying i >> think it is in the "too hard" pile for now and we as software security >> people should not be advocating for it until or unless we can find >> cost effective ways to implement it. > > Certainly it is not a dry well. For the operating system I deal > with, application programmers _consistently_ ignore the facility > provided for fine-grained access to files and leave users with > coarse-grained access as their only recourse. So attempting to apply it is not a dry well and not too hard - just typically done as a retrofit due to political rather than techical circumstance. I had a friend who was working on software where multi-million dollar accounts failed to balance correctly. That defect got considerable management attention. The same _could_ be done for security. -- Larry Kilgallen _______________________________________________ Secure Coding mailing list (SC-L) SC-L@securecoding.org List information, subscriptions, etc - http://krvw.com/mailman/listinfo/sc-l List charter available at - http://www.securecoding.org/list/charter.php SC-L is hosted and moderated by KRvW Associates, LLC (http://www.KRvW.com) as a free, non-commercial service to the software security community. _______________________________________________
