A secure networked laboratory for kernel programming

  • Authors:
  • Jean Mayo;Phil Kearns

  • Affiliations:
  • Michigan Technological University, 1400 Townsend DR, Houghton, MI;College of William and Mary, P.O. Box 8795, Williamsburg, VA

  • Venue:
  • ITiCSE '98 Proceedings of the 6th annual conference on the teaching of computing and the 3rd annual conference on Integrating technology into computer science education: Changing the delivery of computer science education
  • Year:
  • 1998

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Abstract

Recently, several flavours of UNIX have appeared which run on inexpensive personal computers. Further, the source code for these operating systems is freely available. This makes offering courses that include realistic kernel programming feasible in an academic environment. However, root access is required in order to modify a system's kernel. This poses a potential security threat both to other systems on the network and to other users of a single machine. This paper presents a lab design which securely integrates machines with untrusted users acting as root into a secured network, and which securely allows multiple users root access to the same machine.