Privilege Level And No Proper Fault Containment

Specifically, this Category measures the effectiveness of network communications and controls, how IT managers control system access, while restricting removable media according to the principle of “least functionality.” The least functionality principle restricts the use of ports, protocols, gateways, and services to only those essential services required to use them.

One form of hardware support that guarantees that a buffer overflow attack does not take place is to prevent the execution of code that is located in the stack segment of a process’s address space.

In November of 2002, a researcher experimented with a program on CareGroup’s network and left the program running. This program involved massive amounts of data being transferred across the network. As the program continued to run, it monopolized a centrally located network switch. This caused data to flow along alternate paths. As data ran through these peripheral paths, it exposed problems that had been masked. The paths had not had to handle the volume of data that was being transmitted before and it lead to problems involving the flow of information. These peripheral paths ended up getting thrown into a loop which caused them to malfunction as well.

Implementing principle of least privilege helps to maintain computer security. Each user or module would start with no privileges and only be granted those that are deemed necessary to carry

Reliable software and unreliable software is very important when it comes to computer systems. They both deals with the operation of the computer systems for a specified time. Without software, computers would just be hardware that has no specified purpose. There would never be any output or function for the computer systems because the software is what actually gives the system life. Software is not just used for the “everyday” computer that we sit down in from of in every day. It is used for multiple things such as pacemakers, airplanes, medical devices, and cellular devices.

SELinux (Security-Enhanced Linux) was developed by the U.S National Security Agency and essentially enforces security policies that limits what a user or program can do by implementing MAC (Mandatory Access Control) in the Linux kernel. It defines a security policy that controls many different things such as files, devices, sockets, ports and even some processes. The Security-enhanced Linux's features are designed to enforce the separation of information based on confidentiality and integrity requirements. They are designed for preventing processes from reading data and programs, tampering with data and programs, bypassing application security mechanisms, executing untrustworthy programs, or interfering with other processes in violation

A distributed operating system is one that looks like an ordinary centralized operating system but runs on multiple, independent central processing units (CPUs). It implements transparency i.e. use of multiple processors is invisible to the user. The users of a true distributed system are not concerned with which machine (or machines) their programs are running on, where their files are stored, and so on. It is the software, not the hardware, that determines whether a system is distributed or not. A high degree of fault tolerance is an implicit goal for such a system.

SELinux, an implementation of Mandatory Access Control (MAC) in the Linux kernel, adds the ability to administratively define policies on all subjects (processes) and objects (devices, files, and signaled processes). This mechanism is in the Linux kernel, checking for allowed operations after standard Linux Discretionary Access Controls DAC are checked.

C has been the most popular programming language for the last several decades due to its simplicity and superior performance. Due to this reason, most legacy software is in C. But in recent times, several breaches in security and reliability have been found to occur due to lack of memory safety of the C programming language. Memory-corruption bugs in programs can breach security, and faults in kernel extensions can bring down the entire operating system. Modern languages such as C# and Java enforce memory safety and hence prevent these security vulnerabilities.

“Fault tolerant computing is the art and study of building figuring frameworks that keep on operating agreeably within the sight of issues”. A fault tolerant framework might have the capacity to endure at least one faults including – i) transient, irregular or perpetual equipment faults, ii) programming and equipment plan blunders, iii) administrator mistakes, or iv) remotely prompted upsets or physical harm. A broad technique has been produced in this field in the course of recent years, and various fault tolerant machines have been created - most managing arbitrary equipment issues, while a littler number manage programming, outline and administrator deficiencies to fluctuating degrees. A lot of supporting research has been accounted for.

Since developers are increasingly building distributed operating systems, the way to deal with complexity is using the concepts of containers. Containers are a native OS construct that provide light weight isolation. In Linux there is a concept that is comprised of different sub-concepts. There are namespaces that provide isolations for user database, processes and IP addresses. Think of a container as hosted on top of an Linux OS and it gets its own database, processes and IP addresses. It also gets cgroups which governs resources. They make sure that not one container is using all the resources but it shared all the way across. Each container gets a read write view such a Union File system. These three make up the idea of a container.

Operating systems and security is a broad topic that encompasses software flaws and malware, buffer overflows, virus and worms, malware and detection, software reverse engineering, digital rights management, secure software development and others; but for the sake of simplicity, we will discuss how we can reduce or mitigate that attacks by applying operating system security. We will categorize these security issues in relation to the operating systems security functions, more specifically, the role of trusted OS and the Next Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB).

General purpose Operating Systems provide services that do not line up with the needs of parallel runtime systems and sophisticated languages and compilers. In an environment that supports the bifurcation of a system into user and kernel level modes, runtime executions at user level cannot leverage hardware features due to requirement of kernel mode privileges. As a result a large portion of the functionality is lost. We thereby propose an idea to transform parallel runtimes into OS kernels. We further hypothesize that it is feasible to do so.

Windows XP has a microkernel that sits between the Hardware Abstraction Layer and the executive, it provides multiprocessor synchronization, thread and interrupt scheduling and

Linux is used on variety of hardware (e.g. on workstations, mid-and high-end servers and on gadgets), which makes it unique [6]. Linux keeps maintaining its position in the market due to the hard work of both employees and volunteers [6].