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Thursday, August 27, 2015

Protection and Security



Protection and Security
Google Drive Link - Protection and Security
·        Protection
o    Mechanism for controlling the access of processes or users to the resources defined by a computer system.
o   Mechanism should specify - Controls to be imposed
o   Uses:
§  Improves reliability of the system by detecting errors and
§  Prevents contamination of a sub-system by another malfunctioning sub-system.
o   Unprotected data cannot defend against of use of unauthorized user whereas protection-oriented system can identify authorized and unauthorized usage.
o   Note:-A system can have adequate protection but still be prone to failure and allow inappropriate access.
§  Ex: - when genuine user authentication details are stolen.
·        Security:
o   To defend a system from external and internal attacks.
§  Ex;- virus, worm & Denial-of-Service
o   Prevention of some of these attacks is performed as operating system function on some systems, while others leave the prevention to additional software.
·        USER IDENTIFIERS:
o   Protection and security require the system to be able to distinguish among all its users.
o   Most operating systems maintain a list of user names and associated user identifiers (user IDs)
§  Ex:- Windows NT maintains SECURITY ID(SID)
o   IDs are used by processes & threads and picked when user is authenticated.
o   GROUP IDENTIFIERS:
§  Define a group name and the set of users belonging to that group.
§  Ex:-selected set of users may only be allowed to read the file.
§  A user can be in one or more groups
§  The user's group IDs are also included in every associated process and thread.
o   Escalate privileges:- to gain extra permissions for an activity
§  Ex:- In Unix, “setuid” attribute is used to modify the id of the current user as id of owner of the file ( until extra privileges turned off or program termination).

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