Solaris 8 Security

Security Principles

Basic things first. To begin with, let’s take a look at the basic security principles that underpin almost all security tools and techniques.

Compartmentalization

The Romans used to say “Divide and conquer!” This is how compartmentalization can be introduced. Put in the network and systems security context, compartmentalization means separating parts of the system and services such that when one or some of them are compromised or fail, the others keep running unaffected. In UNIX systems, including Solaris 8, this is often achieved by using sandboxes or, as they are also called, chroot() environments. In chroot() environments, the chroot() system call is used to isolate and run a program in its own part of the file system, ...