Skip to main content

Should an Administrator Trust their Users?

The answer is yes and no (note, in this blog, I'm not talking about cryptographic or identity trust, but systems trust). There are two aspects to this. Firstly, do you think your users will deliberately act against your organisation or try to harm the system? This is not usually the case for corporate employees - you also have severe sanctions available if they do. The second aspect is, do you trust your users NOT to make mistakes? Everyone makes mistakes; we're only human. You don't want accidental updates or changes, so in this sense maybe you shouldn't trust your users.

Actually there are three overall approaches to system trust on networks. We can trust all of the people all of the time (bad idea, but much more common than you'd think), trust no one at any time (maybe too excessive and hinder functionality), or we can trust some of the people some of the time. The last one is usually the best strategy to adopt for your network.

Finally, we have to decide on the overall approach to security. Are we permissive or restrictive? In a permissive environment you can do everything, apart from those things on a blacklist. In a restrictive environment, you can do nothing, apart from those things on a whitelist. From a security standpoint restrictive is better, but from a usability standpoint permissive is better. If you can manage the whitelist successfully, this is the better solution and only trust some of the users some of the time.

Comments

Popular Posts

Coventry Building Society Grid Card

Coventry Building Society have recently introduced the Grid Card as a simple form of 2-factor authentication. It replaces memorable words in the login process. Now the idea is that you require something you know (i.e. your password) and something you have (i.e. the Grid Card) to log in - 2 things = 2 factors. For more about authentication see this post . How does it work? Very simply is the answer. During the log in process, you will be asked to enter the digits at 3 co-ordinates. For example: c3, d2 and j5 would mean that you enter 5, 6 and 3 (this is the example Coventry give). Is this better than a secret word? Yes, is the short answer. How many people will choose a memorable word that someone close to them could guess? Remember, that this isn't a password as such, it is expected to be a word and a word that means something to the user. The problem is that users cannot remember lots of passwords, so remembering two would be difficult. Also, having two passwords isn't real

How Reliable is RAID?

We all know that when we want a highly available and reliable server we install a RAID solution, but how reliable actually is that? Well, obviously, you can work it out quite simply as we will see below, but before you do, you have to know what sort of RAID are you talking about, as some can be less reliable than a single disk. The most common types are RAID 0, 1 and 5. We will look at the reliability of each using real disks for the calculations, but before we do, let's recap on what the most common RAID types are. Common Types of RAID RAID 0 is the Stripe set, which consists of 2 or more disks with data written in equal sized blocks to each of the disks. This is a fast way of reading and writing data to disk, but it gives you no redundancy at all. In fact, RAID 0 is actually less reliable than a single disk, as all the disks are in series from a reliability point of view. If you lose one disk in the array, you've lost the whole thing. RAID 0 is used purely to speed up dis

Telephone Systems a Hackable Backdoor?

I have been talking to a company that provides telephone exchanges and services to companies this week on behalf of a client and it has highlighted a worrying backdoor. It turns out that many of these companies have a way to remotely connect to their exchange for support purposes - they can remotely control, configure and troubleshoot your system to get you back up and running. Exchanges often have additional modems in them to allow for remote connections. This is all very well and good from a managed service point of view, but what about the rest of your network? Can this be exploited to gain entry to your network? Quite possibly in some cases - it certainly needs to be included in your security audit and perimeter testing. Talking about a specific company now, they supply the software to monitor and bill phone calls through the exchange. They remotely install, monitor and manage this software. How do they do that? Well, it turns out that they install LogMeIn on your machine. Now t