computer sciences Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (including ...

, the separation of protection and security is a

design A design is a plan or specification for the construction of an object or system or for the implementation of an activity or process or the result of that plan or specification in the form of a prototype, product, or process. The verb ''to design' ...

choice. Wulf et al. identified protection as a mechanism and

security" \n\n\nsecurity.txt is a proposed standard for websites' security information that is meant to allow security researchers to easily report security vulnerabilities. The standard prescribes a text file called \"security.txt\" in the well known locat ...

as a

policy Policy is a deliberate system of guidelines to guide decisions and achieve rational outcomes. A policy is a statement of intent and is implemented as a procedure or protocol. Policies are generally adopted by a governance body within an orga ...

,Wulf 74 pp.337-345 therefore making the protection-security distinction a particular case of the separation of mechanism and policy principle. Many frameworks consider both as security controls of varying types. For example, protection mechanisms would be considered technical controls, while a policy would be considered an administrative control.

Overview

The adoption of this distinction in a

computer architecture In computer engineering, computer architecture is a description of the structure of a computer system made from component parts. It can sometimes be a high-level description that ignores details of the implementation. At a more detailed level, the ...

usually means that protection is provided as a

fault tolerance Fault tolerance is the property that enables a system to continue operating properly in the event of the failure of one or more faults within some of its components. If its operating quality decreases at all, the decrease is proportional to the ...

mechanism by hardware/

firmware In computing, firmware is a specific class of computer software that provides the low-level control for a device's specific hardware. Firmware, such as the BIOS of a personal computer, may contain basic functions of a device, and may provide h ...

and kernel, whereas the

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

and

applications Application may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Application software, computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks ** Application layer, an abstraction layer that specifies protocols and interface methods used in a c ...

implement their security policies. In this design, security policies rely therefore on the protection mechanisms and on additional

cryptography Cryptography, or cryptology (from grc, , translit=kryptós "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or '' -logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adv ...

techniques. The major hardware approachSwift 2005 p.26 for security or protection is the use of hierarchical protection domains. A prominent example of this approach is the ring architecture with " supervisor mode" and "user mode". Such an approach adopts a policy already at the lower levels (hardware/firmware/kernel), restricting the rest of the system to rely on it. Therefore, the choice to distinguish between protection and security in the overall architecture design implies rejection of the hierarchical approach in favour of another one, the

capability-based addressing In computer science, capability-based addressing is a scheme used by some computers to control access to memory as an efficient implementation of capability-based security. Under a capability-based addressing scheme, pointers are replaced by prote ...

. Examples of models with protection and security separation include access matrix,

UCLA Data Secure Unix The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the Califor ...

take-grant The take-grant protection model is a formal model used in the field of computer security to establish or disprove the safety of a given computer system that follows specific rules. It shows that even though the question of safety is in general und ...

and filter. Such separation is not found in models like

high-water mark A high water mark is a point that represents the maximum rise of a body of water over land. Such a mark is often the result of a flood, but high water marks may reflect an all-time high, an annual high (highest level to which water rose that ...

, Bell–LaPadula (original and revisited), information flow,

strong dependency Strong may refer to: Education * The Strong, an educational institution in Rochester, New York, United States * Strong Hall (Lawrence, Kansas), an administrative hall of the University of Kansas * Strong School, New Haven, Connecticut, United St ...

and constraints.Landwehr 81, pp. 254, 257; there's a table showing which models for computer security separates protection mechanism and security policy on p. 273

Notes

References

*Houdek, M. E., Soltis, F. G., and Hoffman, R. L. 1981.
IBM System/38 support for capability-based addressing
'. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM International Symposium on Computer Architecture. ACM/IEEE, pp. 341–348. *

Intel Corporation Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 serie ...

(2002)
The IA-32 Architecture Software Developer’s Manual, Volume 1: Basic Architecture
' *Carl E. Landwehr
Formal Models for Computer Security

Volume 13, Issue 3 (September 1981) pp. 247 – 278 * Swift, Michael M; Brian N. Bershad, Henry M. Levy,
Improving the reliability of commodity operating systems
'

ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), v.23 n.1, p. 77-110, February 2005 *

Computer security Dichotomies {{comp-sci-stub

Overview

See also

Notes

References