There are numerous security-relevant expectations that
people may have of a particular computer system, such as the following:
- Preservation of human safety and general personal well-being
in the context of computer-related activities. Computer systems
in numerous disciplines (transportation, medical, utilities, process
control, etc.) are increasingly being called upon to play a key role
in life-critical operations.
- Observance of privacy rights, proprietary interests, and other expected
attributes. People should be notified when they are being subjected
to unusual monitoring activities, and should be given the opportunity
to observe and correct erroneous personal data.
- Prevention against undesired human behavior. This includes malicious
acts such as sabotage, misuse, fraud, compromise, piracy, and similar
antisocial acts. It also includes accidental acts that could have been
prevented.
- Prevention against undesired system behavior, such as hardware or
software induced crashes, wrong results, untolerated fault modes, excessive
delays, etc.
- Balancing the rights of system users against the rights of system
administration, particularly with respect to resource usage and monitoring.
These requirements are intertwined with value-related issues
in a variety of ways, including some related to human foibles in system design,
development, operation, and use, and some related to misplaced trust in systems
– e.g., excessive or inadequate.
The above human-motivated requirements are typically
related to computer system requirements, such as the following:
- System security requirements, both functional and behavioral. Computer
systems should dependably enforce certain agreed-upon system and
application security policies such as system integrity, data confidentiality,
data integrity, system and application availability, reliability, timeliness,
human safety with respect to the system, etc., as needed to enforce
or enhance the socially relevant requirements listed in the previous
section.
There are also numerous security-relevant expectations that
system designers and administrators may wish to make of people involved in particular
computer systems and applications. At one extreme are reasonable expectations
on supposedly cooperative and benign users, all of whom are trusted within some
particular limits; at the other extreme is the general absence of assumptions
on human behavior – admitting the possibility of “Byzantine”
human behavior such as arbitrarily malicious or deviant behavior by unknown
and potentially hostile users. A few of the most important expectations are
the following. It is convenient to consider both forms of human behavior within
a common set of assumptions, with benign behavior treated as a special case
of Byzantine behavior.
- Nonspecific expectations relevant across the spectrum of users, e.g.,
cooperative and uncooperative, remote and local, authorized and unauthorized.
Sensible security policies must be established and enforced, with default
access attributes that support the user’s needs and the administrators’
demands for controllable system use.
- User security requirements on generally cooperative users. Even in
the presence of friendly users, benignness assumptions are risky, particularly
in light of masqueraders and accidents. In relatively constrained or
non-hostile environments, it may be reasonable to make some simplifying
assumptions, e.g., that there are no external penetrators (as in a classified
system that has no external access and only trusted users), and that
the likelihood of malicious misuse by authorized users is relatively
small, and then to make appropriate checks for deviations.
- User security assumptions on potentially uncooperative users. Designing
for Byzantine human behavior is an extremely difficult task, just as
it is for Byzantine fault modes. In a totally hostile environment, it
may be necessary to assume the worst, including arbitrary malice by
individuals and possible collusion among collaborating hostile authorized
users, as well as unreliability of hardware.
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