Privacy

In today's society, people assume that they are privaleged to certain rights. Moreover, many people believe that there exist certain inalienable human rights. This is not true. The only rights we have are the ones which society, in the form of the govornment, issue to us. This is observable in that most societies do not share the same concepts of "rights," and many people live their entire lives without those rights which we members of Western society take for granted. This assumption of the existance of rights leads to pacifism on the part of the members of society, and a lack of effort by the members to ensure their rights are maintained.

The Govornment is a necessary force for order and organization. As a force, it will always tend towards the greatest maximum order. There must be constant effort my the members of the society to ensure that this inclination toward order is not allowed to progress to the point where it becomes stifling and detrimental to the society it is intending to protect.

If you desire a right, you must fight for that right. Due to the structure of our govornment, you must also be willing to afford others the same rights you expect for yourself. If you are not willing to accept the rights of others as the price of your own accessability to that right, you have very little recourse in our society.

If you desire a right for privacy, you must yourself ensure your own privacy. On computer, this means ensuring that you exercise your options to increase the security of your data. There are several means to your disposal. There are three aspects of cryptography:

1. Data encryption. This is the securing of media so that only the parties intended to process the data are allowed to process the data.
2. Data verification. This is the signing of data so that the recipient may verify that data originated, unaltered, from the expected source.
3. Authentication. This is the process of verifying that an entity is who they claim to be.

(3) is not dissimilar to (2), but the subtle differences are enough to group them seperately.

UNIX is an excellant platform for security, in all areas. Strong cryptography is available in several forms:

1. PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is a freely available package which covers issues (1) and (2). PGP is used primarily for transfere of information, such as email or data files. It lacks a convenient method to qualify it as a usable method for storing information.
2. CFS (Crypto File System) is a freely available package covering issue (1). It is designed to be convenient to use as a data storage medium.
3. Kerberos is a freely available package covering issue (3) on networks. It is conventient to use.
4. PAM is a freely available package covering issue (3) locally. It is transparent to the user. PAM fails to be a complete solution due to the fact that it fails to address process control and the inherant weakness of the superuser.

Consistent, correct use of these packages improve security. Package (1) requires significant effort on the part of the user for proper use. Package (2) requires minimal effort on the part of the user, once installed. Packages (3) and (4) are nearly transparent to the user, once installed. None of these packages provide security for NFS.

The MVS operating system has a very good local security model. UNIX can use a good freely distributable implementation of MVS, but one does not exist. MVS security provides better security than PAM, and could use both Kerberos and CFS to provide transparent, secure computing. MVS security addresses process control and restricts the power of the superuser (or eliminates the superuser).