Re: ideal secure personal computer system

[frantz@netcom.com (Bill Frantz)]

At 12:24 AM 11/16/96 -0600, Igor Chudov @ home wrote:
>Bill Frantz wrote:
>> Protection against strangers walking up to your machine and using it is
>> nice, and easy to do.  Protection against viruses which install Trojan
>> horses in your system would also be nice, but is very hard to do in systems
>> where programs run with all the privileges of their users.  Examples
>> include (in alpha order): DOS, MacOS, Unix, and Windows (including NT).
>
>I wonder what are the operating systems where programs may be run with
>_less_ privileges than the user who starts them? Is VMS one of such 
>systems?

Ah, you touch on 20+ years of my professional life.  KeyKOS is such a
system as is EROS, a similar system being developed at University of
Pennsylvania.  See:

http://www.cis.upenn.edu:80/~eros/
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~KeyKOS/
http://www.agorics.com/agorics/allkey.html - For KeyKOS documentation.

In general these systems provide an execution environment where programs
only have access to the resources they need.  Think of it as a Unix chroot
jail which is specifically designed for each program.  Then add controlled
communication links back to the user's terminal and you get the idea. 
Unless a program has a need to write the system file, it won't have the
privilege, even if it's user does have the privilege.


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