Protection in operating systems
- 1 August 1976
- journal article
- Published by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in Communications of the ACM
- Vol. 19 (8) , 461-471
- https://doi.org/10.1145/360303.360333
Abstract
A model of protection mechanisms in computing systems is presented and its appropriateness is argued. The “safety” problem for protection systems under this model is to determine in a given situation whether a subject can acquire a particular right to an object. In restricted cases, it can be shown that this problem is decidable, i.e. there is an algorithm to determine whether a system in a particular configuration is safe. In general, and under surprisingly weak assumptions, it cannot be decided if a situation is safe. Various implications of this fact are discussed.Keywords
This publication has 8 references indexed in Scilit:
- Protection and the control of information sharing in multicsCommunications of the ACM, 1974
- The UNIX time-sharing systemCommunications of the ACM, 1974
- ProtectionACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, 1974
- A note on the confinement problemCommunications of the ACM, 1973
- Correctness in access controlPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1973
- Protection systems and protection implementationsPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1972
- Protection in an information processing utilityCommunications of the ACM, 1968
- Programming semantics for multiprogrammed computationsCommunications of the ACM, 1966