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It should be the case that even administrator access should not be abusable If administrator access is equivalent to ownership, then I strongly disagree.
by userbinator 1y ago
It should be the case that even administrator access should not be abusable
If administrator access is equivalent to ownership, then I strongly disagree.
- adastra22 1y agoEven as an owner, you should not be able to arbitrarily restrict the rights of future owners.
- userbinator 1y agoUnfortunately the existence of things like efuses and OTP makes that very difficult.
- ohyoutravel 1y agoNo more hole sawing my old hard drives for me, lest I restrict rights of future owners to use the drives as storage devices.
- DangitBobby 1y agoWell they'd still have the right, just not the ability (this is actually a distinction US courts have made regarding arbitration clauses and legal recourse).
- Dylan16807 1y agoUnless you got it to saw itself via administrator access you've drifted off the intent of this conversation.
- shakna 1y agoAs an administrator, you generally expect to be able to change your mind at some point. Flashing data? Fine. Permanent? Not so much.
- ang_cire 1y agoThis logic doesn't hold. If I choose to dban or degauss something, I don't expect I should be able to recover it later. Admins absolutely have the option to make irreversible changes, and do this quite often.
- shakna 1y agoRight. But degaussing isn't a "general" decision. Updating most systems is.
- ang_cire 1y agoDegaussing (for orgs who do it) is just as operational a task as updating. There will be an SOP that covers data storage decommissioning. It's not as frequent, but it's not any less 'normal', certainly not ad-hoc or one-off. You don't invest in a degausser "just in case".
- shakna 1y agoNo, that's not what I meant. I was referring to tasks you might perform regularly on the same machine. You don't go ahead and erase the same disk once a week. Decommissioning isn't something that occurs for the same project, once a month. Its not the same operational process.
- cyphar 1y agoJust because some administrative decisions are permanent and destructive doesn't mean that every operation should be made permanent or destructive. Should every software config require buying new hardware because the initial config gets permanently flashed with an e-fuse to only allow a single write? You could even make a security argument for such a setup, but good luck getting approval for your 15th motherboard this quarter because you typo'd the config. Also, dban and degaussing is not entirely equivalent -- from a practical perspective the equivalent is hard drive shredding (because the hardware cannot be used again in the old/non-malware config -- dban and degaussing are more like factory default resets). Do some organisations need to do this? Sure. Should we design systems with the assumption that any mistake means that the hardware is destined for the shredder? I would hope not...