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February 18, 2003

Access control scalability

Jiri Ludvik (via Scott Loftesness, because Jiri wrote "Groove rocks!" a couple of days ago) has some interesting observations around access control. He quotes Daniel Geer:

If you look at the access control problem, it is a matrix. The rows are requestors and the columns are objects of their desire. Linear growth in either or both means geometric growth in the number of table entries in that matrix... beyond a certain size no one can get their head around it anymore... An awful lot of legacy systems' durability is explicitly derived from this combination of "essential" and "cannot be understood."
Lovely. Yet, decentralisation of the security can help here too. Decentralization makes things personal and immediate. In the context of security, is it possible to decentralize - make individuals at the edge partially responsible for who they can share information with, by putting some of that directly in their field of view - but keep a sensible amount of stringency, planning and oversight? I think, actually, it is.