Cut me some security
Divya Muthukumaran, Sandra Julieta Rueda, Hayawardh Vijayakumar, Trent Jaeger · 2010
Computer security is currently fraught with fine-grained access control policies, in operating systems, applications and even programming languages. All this policy configuration means that too many decisions are left to administrators, developers and even users to some extent and as a result we do not get any comprehensive security guarantees. In this position paper, we take a stand for the idea that less policy is better and propose that limiting the choices given to parties along the development and deployment process leads to a more secure system. We argue that other systems processes like scheduling and memory management achieve their goals with minimal user input and access control configuration should also follow suit. We then suggest a technique to automate access control configuration using graph-cuts and show that this gets us closer to achieving our goal.