Information security publication (1975)
The Protection of Information in Computer Systems is a 1975 seminal publication by Jerome Saltzer and Michael Schroeder about information security.[1][2] The paper emphasized that the primary concern of security measures should be the information on computers and not the computers itself.[3]
It was published 10 years prior to Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria, commonly known as the Orange Book.[4]
The following design principles are laid out in the paper:
- Economy of mechanism: Keep the design as simple and small as possible.
- Fail-safe defaults: Base access decisions on permission rather than exclusion.
- Complete mediation: Every access to every object must be checked for authority.
- Open design: The design should not be secret.
- Separation of privilege: Where feasible, a protection mechanism that requires two keys to unlock it is more robust and flexible than one that allows access to the presenter of only a single key.
- Least privilege: Every program and every user of the system should operate using the least set of privileges necessary to complete the job.
- Least common mechanism: Minimize the amount of mechanism common to more than one user and depended on by all users.
- Psychological acceptability: It is essential that the human interface be designed for ease of use, so that users routinely and automatically apply the protection mechanisms correctly.
- Work factor: Compare the cost of circumventing the mechanism with the resources of a potential attacker.
- Compromise recording: It is sometimes suggested that mechanisms that reliably record that a compromise of information has occurred can be used in place of more elaborate mechanisms that completely prevent loss.
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