From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@imsi.com>
Date: Tue, 24 Jan 95 15:36:19 PST
To: "James A. Donald" <jamesd@netcom.com>
Subject: Re: Clinton freezes U.S. assets of Mideast groups
In-Reply-To: <Pine.3.89.9501241122.A12422-0100000@netcom10>
Message-ID: <9501242335.AA14267@snark.imsi.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



"James A. Donald" says:
> At present it seems to me that unix machines on the internet
> are intrinsicly insecure -- the methods used to secure them
> are a collection of ad hoc patches.  For example all
> unix machines are vulnerable to the trojan
> horse attack.
> 
> (I expect the usual flame from Perry that I am stupifyingly
> ignorant and that that is all fixed or will be shortly 
> -- no Perry it is not all fixed -- it cannot be fixed.  

Actually, I would be curious to find out from James what the hell he's
talking about. Yes, if you get a priv'ed user to run a program it can
do anything. Thats the case in all operating systems that I know of.

> Windows NT is supposedly secure.

And my mother is a bicycle.

NT is about as secure as VMS was, i.e. not at all. Its just got
different bugs.

> Certainly its design makes it possible to write software that is
> intrinsicly secure, rather than creating a particular fix for each
> particular hole.

You mean, it makes proof of security possible for real programs? That
there is a proof of security available for the NT kernel? I'd settle
for a proof of non-crashing myself. Short of that I'm unaware of any
system that is "intrinsically" secure.

Now, I don't believe, in general, in flaming people for gross
ignorance, but it seems that Mr. Donald believes that there is some
sort of design flaw in Unix that makes it "inherently insecure". I
have no idea what this flaw might be. I know that Unix suffers from
the same problem all other operating systems from MVS to VMS to NT to
whatever else you can name suffer from -- bugs that make it possible
to break the system. If Mr. Donald can name an operating system that
has some sort of systematic way to make it secure that he knows of --
in other words, a formal proof of security of the system (i.e. an A1
secure system by the formal nomenclature), I'll happily hear about it
from him for the first time. Certainly my teachers never heard of such
a thing, and neither have I.

Perry