PlanetLab creates a ‘more advanced sudo’

[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for
this link. ]

“Sudo is a widely used Unix and Linux command line-based tool
that can restrict what operations a user can perform on a computer.
Typically it is used by system administrators to grant users
elevated privileges to some advanced level of functionality on a
computer without granting them absolute, ‘root’ privileges for the
machine. Also, as an alternative to logging in as root, sudo helps
administrators themselves be more cognizant of undertaking
potentially harmful actions.

“Vsys is similar to sudo, except it offers finer-grained access
to system resources. ‘Users sometimes make demands for features and
resources not directly supported by the default security model,’
Bhatia said. ‘They might want files they don’t have visibility
into, or they might want to run commands you wouldn’t allow
ordinary users to run.'”

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