Educause Security Discussion mailing list archives
Re: User Privilege Levels.
From: Gary Flynn <flynngn () JMU EDU>
Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2009 17:01:45 -0500
Karen Stopford wrote:
Have any of you run into resistance when trying to reduce privileges, where faculty claims "academic freedom?" Not a technical question but a political one. I am just wondering how you might have handled it. You can email me offline if you would like.
Karen, We're just starting to convert Windows machines to non-administrator accounts and haven't reached the academic areas yet so I can't speak from experience under fire. But I'll throw my $0.02 worth in anyway. :) Certainly, academic endeavors have a greater need for leeway in this area than do administrative areas. On the other hand, those needs don't extend to putting constituent data at risk. If your risk assessment says that operating a computer with administrative privileges presents unnecessarily high risk in today's high threat environment ( and it should ), and the mitigation you've chosen is to operate computers using non-administrative accounts, then exceptions and the residual risk implicitly accepted, must be approved ( and accepted ) by someone in authority. One could make the argument that computers used to access services containing constituent data or affecting services must be operated with a non-administrator account while others are sandboxed into their own area with almost no access to campus resources. Or a VM could be provided for academic exploration while the primary machine, affecting constituent data and university operations, is operated in the more conservative manner. Not ideal, but a possibility. We've chosen to deploy BeyondTrust Privilege Manager with a "magic folder". A user is free to place a file in there which, when executed, will run with elevated privileges in the context of the user profile. While its certainly possible someone might put happy_valentine.exe or video_codec.exe or antivirus_2009.exe in that folder, hopefully proper folder naming, location, and user education will minimize the chances. In the meantime, the rest of the operating environment, particularly the browser, is operating with regular user account permissions. Use of this functionality will be discouraged when there are university packaged applications available and, in general, for *administrative* ( as opposed to academic ) users without pressing business justification for software installation on a university owned business computer. But its a feature that should make the non-administrator environment much more palatable to academic areas that have a need to install more software and experiment more with the computing environment. Finally, most reasonable people, when the current threat environment is demonstrated for them, will understand the desire to move to non-administrator accounts. If there are a few people who you cannot move to the less risky environment, at least you've moved the others thus decreasing the overall risk to your constituent's data and univeristy services.
Thanks, Karen C. Karen Stopford, CISSP Associate Executive Officer for I.T. Security CT State University System 39 Woodland Street Hartford, CT 06105 (860) 493-0116 -----Original Message----- From: The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU] On Behalf Of Jim Pollard Sent: Tuesday, February 24, 2009 12:12 PM To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU Subject: Re: [SECURITY] User Privilege Levels. I can only speak from the department level but what we do is give everyone general user access and temporarily grant administrator access if necessary using group policy. If administrator access is absolutely insisted upon we may permit it with the caveat that the user is responsible for ensuring security and receives limited support. ~Jim Jim Pollard Computer Systems Development Specialist Department of Biomedical Engineering University of Texas at Austin it () bme utexas edu 512.789.4345 "The intelligent man is capable of overcoming problems and difficulties the wise man would have avoided in the first place." Rabbi Yusef Becher -----Original Message----- From: The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU] On Behalf Of Matthew Gracie Sent: Monday, February 23, 2009 9:46 AM To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU Subject: [SECURITY] User Privilege Levels. We're in the midst of planning a rollout to Active Directory for our end user authentication, and so we'll be joining all college-owned end user computers to the domain. I'm curious about privilege levels. What sort of access are other institutions giving their users to their computers? * Are your users granted Administrative power over their own machines? * Do you have a uniform level for all employees, or does it vary by position? * Can an employee move between schemes, applying for greater access after passing a security training test or some similar mechanism? Thanks for any replies. Feel free to respond off-list, if you like. --Matt -- Matt Gracie (716) 888-8378 Information Security Administrator graciem () canisius edu Canisius College ITS Buffalo, NY http://www2.canisius.edu/~graciem/graciem_public_key.gpg
-- Gary Flynn Security Engineer James Madison University www.jmu.edu/computing/security
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Current thread:
- User Privilege Levels. Matthew Gracie (Feb 23)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: User Privilege Levels. Karen Stopford (Feb 23)
- Re: User Privilege Levels. Tupker, Mike (Feb 23)
- Re: User Privilege Levels. Stanclift, Michael (Feb 23)
- Re: User Privilege Levels. Karen Stopford (Feb 23)
- Re: User Privilege Levels. Themba Flowers (Feb 23)
- Re: User Privilege Levels. Daly, Douglas (Feb 24)
- Re: User Privilege Levels. Jim Pollard (Feb 24)
- Re: User Privilege Levels. Karen Stopford (Feb 24)
- Re: User Privilege Levels. Basgen, Brian (Feb 24)
- Re: User Privilege Levels. Gary Flynn (Feb 24)
- Re: User Privilege Levels. Spransy, Derek (Feb 24)
- Re: User Privilege Levels. Karen Stopford (Feb 24)
- Re: User Privilege Levels. Stanclift, Michael (Feb 24)
- Re: User Privilege Levels. Harold Winshel (Feb 24)
- Re: User Privilege Levels. Gary Flynn (Feb 25)
- Re: User Privilege Levels. Spransy, Derek (Feb 25)
- Re: User Privilege Levels. John Hoffoss (Mar 18)