Make Least Privilege a Right (Not a Privilege) Maxwell Krohn∗, Petros Efstathopoulosy, Cliff Frey∗, Frans Kaashoek∗, Eddie Kohlery, David Mazieres` z, Robert Morris∗, Michelle Osbornez, Steve VanDeBogarty and David Ziegler∗ ∗MIT yUCLA zNYU
[email protected] ABSTRACT ized mandatory access control [17]. The end result is a Though system security would benefit if programmers new operating system called Asbestos. routinely followed the principle of least privilege [24], 2 LESSONS FROM CURRENT SYSTEMS the interfaces exposed by operating systems often stand in the way. We investigate why modern OSes thwart se- Administrators and programmers can achieve POLP by cure programming practices and propose solutions. pushing the features in modern Unix-like operating sys- tems, but only partially, and with important practical 1 INTRODUCTION drawbacks. Though many software developers simultaneously revere 2.1 chrooting or jailing Greedy Applications and ignore the principles of their craft, they reserve spe- cial sanctimony for the principle of least privilege, or Because Unix grants privilege with coarse granularity, POLP [24]. All programmers agree in theory: an applica- many Unix applications acquire more privileges than tion should have the minimal privilege needed to perform they require. These “greedy applications” can be tamed its task. At the very least, five POLP requirements must with the chroot or jail system calls. Both calls con- be followed: (1) split applications into smaller protec- fine applications to jails, areas of the file system that tion domains, or “compartments”; (2) assign exactly the administrators can configure to exclude setuid executa- right privileges to each compartment; (3) engineer com- bles and sensitive files.