Enforcing the principle of least privilege with a state-based privilege control model

  • Authors:
  • Bin Liang;Heng Liu;Wenchang Shi;Yanjun Wu

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science & Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China;Venus Info Tech Inc., Beijing, China;Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China;Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

  • Venue:
  • ISPEC'05 Proceedings of the First international conference on Information Security Practice and Experience
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

In order to provide effective support to the principle of least privilege, considering the limitation of traditional privilege mechanisms, this paper proposes a new privilege control model called State-Based Privilege Control (SBPC) and presents the design and implementation of a prototype system for SBPC called Controlled Privilege Framework (CPF) on the Linux operating system platform. SBPC decomposes the time space of a process' lifetime into a series of privilege states according to activities of the process and its need for special permissions. The privilege state is closely related to the application logic of a process. It is the privilege state transfer event that stimulates a process to transfer from one privilege state into another one. For a specified process, there is a specific set of privileges corresponding to every privilege state of the process. With the implementation of CPF, experiment results show that fine-grain and automatic privilege control can be exercised transparently to traditional applications, threats of intrusion to a system can be reduced greatly, and support to the principle of least privilege can therefore be achieved effectively.