Book Image

Oracle Solaris 11 Advanced Administration Cookbook

By : Alexandre Borges
Book Image

Oracle Solaris 11 Advanced Administration Cookbook

By: Alexandre Borges

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Oracle Solaris 11 Advanced Administration Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Playing with least privileges


Oracle Solaris 11, like other good UNIX-like operating systems, has a flaw in its inception; there is a privileged account called root that has all special privileges on a system and other accounts that have limited permissions such as regular users. Under this model, a process either has all special privileges or none. Therefore, if we grant permission for a regular user to run a program, usually we are granting much more than is needed, and unfortunately, it could be a problem if a hacker is to crack the application or the system.

In Oracle Solaris 10, developers have introduced a wonderful feature to make the permissions more flexible; least privilege. The base concept is easy; the recommendation is to only grant the necessary privilege for a process, user, or program in order to reduce the damage in case of a serious security breach. For example, when we manage the filesystem's security by applying read, write, and execute rights, we usually grant much more...