Re: Does Security matter at all?

[tb@MIT.EDU (Thomas Bushnell, BSG)]

Remco Blaakmeer <remco-blaakmeer@quicknet.nl> writes:

> Please also consider the case where people have limited, supervised
> physical access to a computer. They can change disks, pull the power plug
> and press the reset button, but they won't be able to open a computer case
> without drawing attention. This is a fairly common situation in schools
> and universities, where students have to be able to save their own
> documents on a floppy disk or work on documents that have been previously
> stored on a floppy disk, and even in people's homes.

At MIT, we took the approach long ago that physical access was enough
to give total power over the machine.  

So we built a network infrastructure of services that assumed that
users in clusters had root, we published the root password (orignally
it was published in the papers that described the Athena system), and
we set the users free.

Thomas