[cap-talk] A Plea for a Topic Change

[Jed Donnelley]

At 12:33 AM 2/21/2007, Bill Frantz wrote:
>markm at cs.jhu.edu (Mark S. Miller) on Sunday, February 18, 2007 wrote:
>
> >Fred's thesis in particular has made our field much richer and 
> deeper. After
> >we discuss and appreciate the issues Fred raises, we will also have a much
> >richer context for revisiting these terminology issues. I propose 
> that we all
> >take a break this week from further terminology discussion and instead read
> >Chapters 1 & 2 of Fred's thesis. Starting the week of 2/25, I'll 
> have the time
> >to start discussing it. As a background part of this discussion, 
> we can try on
> >our various terminology proposals and see how well they fit.
>
>Having read most of Fred's thesis, I agree with MarkM that it makes our
>field much richer and deeper.  It makes it clear that only reasoning
>about permissions does not allow one to reason about the security of a
>system; that instead, one must reason about authority.  It then goes on
>to develop a language for reasoning about authority, and the language
>allows a model of authority to be refined one piece at a time, without
>having to re-do the entire model for each successive refinement.
>All-in-all, a very nice piece of work.

I'm sorry that I've been unavailable for discussions of late (maybe not if I
read MarkM right).  I've started on Fred's thesis and will see how far I
get.  Anybody who plays in a band named called "confused deputies"
certainly for me has some common interest pull at least.

--Jed http://www.webstart.com/jed/