From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Oct 6 12:26: 2 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from apollo.backplane.com (apollo.backplane.com [216.240.41.2]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 394A615330 for ; Wed, 6 Oct 1999 12:25:59 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dillon@apollo.backplane.com) Received: (from dillon@localhost) by apollo.backplane.com (8.9.3/8.9.1) id MAA87484; Wed, 6 Oct 1999 12:25:15 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dillon) Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 12:25:15 -0700 (PDT) From: Matthew Dillon Message-Id: <199910061925.MAA87484@apollo.backplane.com> To: Joe Abley Cc: "Daniel C. Sobral" , Conrad Minshall , FreeBSD Hackers Subject: Re: Apple's planned appoach to permissions on movable filesystems References: <199910052119.OAA24627@scv1.apple.com> <37FB5A53.3E016EFA@newsguy.com> <19991007073435.A20998@patho.gen.nz> Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG :Show me a disk that's _not_ removable. By your logic we would have _no_ :sguid/sgid binaries _ever._ : :Physical access to a machine is always a security risk. Why would you :treat easily-removable media any differently to slightly-harder-to-remove :media? You still need to break into the vault to remove them. : :Joe Well, I don't think this is a very fair argument. There are plenty of situations where you might want to differentiate, even with physical access. For example, take PC's in a library. Lets say that the PC's get all their critical stuff via read-only NFS mounts, but the library wants to allow people to import and export files via the floppy drive. In this example, there is a very definite distinction between a filesystem on the floppy drive and 'everything else'. Even when you throw a hard drive in, just because someone has physical access to the outside of the machine does not necessarily mean that he has physical access to the inside of the machine. Take, for example, a supervised machine or machine which is 'locked down' and has a bios password installed. While it is certainly true that a person could eventually get physical access into the machine, it is a significantly more difficult task and therefore a significant distinction still exists between the data stored on the hard drive and stored in, say, a floppy. -Matt Matthew Dillon To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message