Security testing: need for a security policy, and a security-critical package process

[Matthias Clasen]

On Mon, 2009-11-23 at 14:08 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:

> It's not QA's role to define exactly what the security policy should
> look like or what it should cover, but from the point of view of
> testing, what we really need are concrete requirements. The policy does
> not have to be immediately comprehensive - try and cover every possible
> security-related issue - to be valuable. Something as simple as spot's
> proposed list of things an unprivileged user must not be able to do -
> http://spot.livejournal.com/312216.html - would serve a valuable purpose
> here.

I don't think spots list is too useful, unfortunately; discussing an
abstract 'unprivileged user' without defining some roles and use cases
doesn't make much sense to me. There is probably a difference between a
guest account and a regular (non-admin) user in what I want them to be
able to do; 'unprivileged user' does not allow that distinction. And
there is certainly a difference between what a regular user is expected
to be allowed on a family computer vs a university computer lab.