Question

Explain the idea of least privilege. Why is it important? Offer examples of how this notion could be designed and implemented within a *nix Operating System.

Answer 1

According to the principle of least privilege, we should provide access to the users for different functionality without which their task cannot be complete. It means that we should provide bare minimum privileges to perform their functions.

For example, if an organization, there is an engineer who writes code need not have to access the financial records of the organization and vice versa.

Thus in this way, the principle of least privilege can be understood

It is important to be there as it can help for the following reasons.

1. security
2. Minimized attack surface
3. Limited malware propagation
4. More stability
5. Improved audit readiness

Thus it is very important to have principle of least privileges in the organization.

The above Principle can be used in Unix operating system say in a program while installing, we need to have the root privileges but after the installation, we do not need the root privileges, so we should relinquish them in order to maintain the security in the system.

So any program should relinquish the root privileges as soon as possible. Thus in this way, we can use the above principle to implement principle of least privilege.

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