Multics security, thirty years later [LWN.net]

Multics security, thirty years later

Posted Nov 12, 2002 20:07 UTC (Tue) by chorning (guest, #7686)
Parent article: Multics security, thirty years later

I'd like to say this entire article is FUD. Having worked on Multics in the early 80's at MIT and been a hardcore "hacker" (the Multics core) I can say Multics is a _lot_ larger than a Linux kernel.. The ring 0 controller is about 700k in memory, but the ring 1 and 2 controllers are huge. The Honeywell Project and Multics were started to solve any possible security problems that the engineers could think of. It ran slow as all users were alloted processor time and memory whether they were logged in or not, as this could be used as a discrete channel.

Just to give you an idea of the size of Multics, in 1982 MIT spent over 7 million dollars on storage alone for the machine the famous Rochlis tapes were archived from (last known good copy of the Multics source) and it had a little over 4 gigabytes of storage.

3 things that Linux can learn from Multics:
1) Security costs performance
2) Security is inversely proportional to useability
3) Operating Systems are not political statements, They are for running programs.

-C. Hornig, hardcore hacker '79-84

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