What makes one problem more significant

[Steven Bellovin]

In article <16164 at smoke.brl.mil>, gwyn at smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn) writes:
} I'm not sure I quite understood these categories.  Are they the same as:
} 	1. secure against attack by outsiders
} 	2. secure against attack by insiders
} 	3. secure against accidents
} In these terms, we generally consider category #2 to be something that
} can be dealt with by administrative action, and category #3 is expected
} to be handled by the operating system.  The login password system ought
} to be sufficient to cope with category #1; however, with the advent of
} ..rhosts and NFS there are a lot of new holes to plug.
} 
} I think Dan was going after a problem in category #2, which I don't
} find particularly interesting.

My concerns, and probably Dan's, are twofold.  First, in a comparatively
uncontrolled environment -- say, a university, where the comp center
has to take more or less all comers -- a lot of damage can be done
before the administative procedures are used.  Second, and more serious,
I worry about hackers breaking in to your system via some bug, and then
using it to launch attacks on others.  Collecting passwords is a time-honored
hacker technique.

		--Steve Bellovin