From the 1970s, access control became the centre of gravity of computer security. It's where security engineering meets computer science. Its function is to control which principals (persons, processes, machines, …) have access to which resources in the system – which files they can read, which programs they can execute, how they share data with other principals, and so on. It's become horrendously complex. If you start out by leafing through the 7000-plus pages of Arm's architecture reference manual or the equally complex arrangements for Windows, your first reaction might be ‘I wish I'd studied music instead!’ In this chapter I try to help you make sense of it all.
Access control works at a number of different levels, including at least:
1 Access controls at the application level may express a very rich, domain-specific security policy. The call centre staff in a bank are typically not allowed to see your account details until you have answered a couple of security questions; this not only stops outsiders impersonating you, but also stops the bank staff looking up the accounts of celebrities, or their neighbours. Some transactions might also require approval from a supervisor. And that's nothing compared with the complexity of the access controls on a modern social networking site, which will have a thicket of rules about who can see, copy, and search what data from whom, and privacy options that users can set to modify these rules.
2 The applications may be written on top of middleware, such as a web browser, a bank's bookkeeping system or a social network's database management system. These enforce a number of protection properties. For example, bookkeeping systems ensure that a transaction that debits one account must credit another, with the debits and credits balancing so that money cannot be created or destroyed; they must also allow the system's state to be reconstructed later.
3 As the operating system constructs resources such as files and communications ports from lower level components, it has to provide ways to control access to them. Your Android phone treats apps written by different companies as different users and protects their data from each other. The same happens when a shared server separates the VMs, containers or other resources belonging to different users.
4 Finally, the operating system relies on the processor and its associated memory-management hardware, which control which memory addresses a given process or thread can access.
As we work up from the hardware through the operating system and middleware to the application layer, the controls become progressively more complex and less reliable. And we find the same access-control functions being implemented at multiple layers. For example, the separation between different phone apps that is provided by Android is mirrored in your browser which separates web page material according to the domain name it came from (though this separation is often less thorough). And the access controls built at the application layer or the middleware layer may largely duplicate access controls in the underlying operating system or hardware. It can get very messy, and to make sense of it we need to understand the underlying principles, the common architectures, and how they have evolved.
I will start off by discussing operating-system protection mechanisms that support the isolation of multiple processes. These came first historically – being invented along with the first time-sharing systems in the 1960s – and they remain the foundation on which many higher-layer mechanisms are built, as well as inspiring similar mechanisms at higher layers. They are often described as discretionary access control (DAC) mechanisms, which leave protection to the machine operator, or mandatory access control (MAC) mechanisms which are typically under the control of the vendor and protect the operating system itself from being modified by malware. I'll give an introduction to software attacks and techniques for defending against them – MAC, ASLR, sandboxing, virtualisation and what can be done with hardware. Modern hardware not only provides CPU support for virtualisation and capabilities, but also hardware support such as TPM chips for trusted boot to stop malware being persistent. These help us tackle the toxic legacy of the old single-user PC operating systems such as DOS and Win95/98 which let any process modify any data, and constrain the many applications that won't run unless you trick them into thinking that they are running with administrator privileges.
6.2 Operating system access controls
The access controls provided with an operating system typically authenticate principals using a mechanism such as passwords or fingerprints in the case of phones, or passwords or security protocols in the case of servers, then authorise access to files, communications ports and other system resources.
Access controls can often be modeled as a matrix of access permissions, with columns for files and rows for users. We'll write r for permission to read, w for permission to write, x for permission to execute a program, and - for no access at all, as shown in Figure 6.1.
In this simplified example, Sam is the system administrator and has universal access (except to the audit trail, which even he should only be able to read). Alice, the manager, needs to execute the operating system and application, but only through the approved interfaces – she mustn't have the ability to tamper with them. She also needs to read and write the data. Bob, the auditor, can read everything.
| Operating | Accounts | Accounting | Audit | |
| System | Program | Data | Trail | |
| Sam | rwx | rwx | rw | r |
| Alice | x | x | rw | – |
| Bob | rx | r | r | r |
Figure 6.1: Naive access control matrix
This is often enough, but in the specific case of a bookkeeping system it's not quite what we need. We want to ensure that transactions are well-formed – that each debit is balanced by credits somewhere else – so we don't want Alice to have uninhibited write access to the account file. We would also rather that Sam didn't have this access. So we would prefer that write access to the accounting data file be possible only via the accounting program. The access permissions might now look like in Figure 6.2:
| User | Operating | Accounts | Accounting | Audit |
| System | Program | Data | Trail | |
| Sam | rwx | rwx | r |
|