USENIX 2003 Annual Technical Conference, FREENIX Track — Abstract
| Pp. 273-284 of the Proceedings |
Privman: A Library for Partitioning Applications
Douglas Kilpatrick, Network Associates Laboratories
Abstract
Writing secure, trusted software for UNIX platforms is difficult. There are a number of approaches to enabling more secure development, but it is apparent that the current set of solutions are neither achieving acceptance nor having sufficient impact. In this paper, we introduce a library to address a particularly difficult problem in secure code development: partitioning processes to isolate privileges in trusted code.
Privilege separation is a technique that isolates trusted code, therefore reducing the amount of code that needs to be carefully audited. While the technique is not new, it is not widely used due to difficulties of implementation. We present Privman, a library that makes privilege separation easy. The primary benefit of the Privman library is a systematic, reusable framework and library for developing partitioned applications. We demonstrate the feasibility of the approach by applying it to two real systems, thttpd and WU-FTPD.
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