Outline for October 22, 2025

Reading: text, §16.2–16.4, 13.1
Assignments: Homework 2, due October 22; Project selection, due November 7

1. Greetings and Felicitations!

2. Capabilities
   1. Capability-based addressing
   2. Capabilities as security mechanisms
   3. Inheritance of C-Lists
   4. Revocation

3. MULTICS ring mechanism
   1. Rings, gates, ring-crossing faults
   2. Used for both data and procedures; rights are REWA
      (b₁, b₂) access bracket—can access freely; (b₃, b₄) call bracket—can call segment through gate; so if a’s access bracket is (32, 35) and its call bracket is (35, 39), then assuming permission mode (REWA) allows access, a procedure in:
      rings 0–31: can access a, but ring-crossing fault occurs
      rings 32–35: can access a, no ring-crossing fault
      rings 36–39: can access a, provided a valid gate is used as an entry point
      rings 40–63: cannot access a
   3. If the procedure is accessing a data segment d, no call bracket allowed; given the above, assuming permission mode (REWA) allows access, a procedure in:
      rings 0–32: can access d
      rings 33–35: can access d, but cannot write to it (W or A)
      rings 36–63: cannot access d

4. Lock and Key
   1. Associate with each object a lock; associate with each process that has access to object a key (it’s a cross between ACLs and C-Lists)
   2. Example: cryptographic (Gifford). X object enciphered with key K. Associate an opener R with X. Then:
      OR-Access: K can be recovered with any D_i in a list of n deciphering transformations, so
      R = (E₁(K), E₂(K), …, E_n(K)) and any process with access to any of the D_i’s can access the file
      AND-Access: need all n deciphering functions to get K: R = E₁(E₂(… E_n(K) …))

5. Types and locks

6. Authentication
   1. Validating client (user) identity
   2. Validating server (system) identity
   3. Validating both (mutual authentication)
   4. Basis: what you know/have/are, where you are

Matt Bishop Office: 2209 Watershed Sciences Phone: +1 (530) 752-8060 Email: mabishop@ucdavis.edu

ECS 235A, Computer and Information Security Version of October 26, 2025 at 6:21PM

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