[ Thanks to Christopher
Pallack for this link. ]
“Medusa is a kernel patch that improves security by
providing a seamless protective layer between system resources and
applications, providing access control to system
resources.”
“In Unix, if you compromise one user in particular, ‘root’, you
have access to the entire system; no actions are denied you. You
can hack the system and then cover your tracks, erasing log files
and emplacing back-doors. This is a greater problem than it
initially appears, because of the fact that many daemons run as
root. Bugs in the daemons often lead to exploits which leave the
intruder with root access…”
“MVS does not have this problem. Root’s responsibilities are
divided up among multiple administrative users, so that no one user
alone can compromise a system. It does this through a mechanism in
the kernel that queries an external security manager
program…”
“Medusa… is a project to provide MVS-like security management
for Linux. At this point, Medusa only exists for the Linux
kernel…”