Oracle Solaris Security for Developers Guide

System Security

For system security, the Solaris OS provides process privileges. Process privileges are an alternative to the standard, superuser-based UNIX model for granting access to privileged applications. The system administrator assigns users a set of process privileges that permit access to privileged applications. A user does not need to become superuser to use a privileged application.

Privileges enable system administrators to delegate limited permission to users to override system security instead of giving users complete root access. Accordingly, developers who create new privileged applications should test for specific privileges instead of checking for UID = 0. See Chapter 2, Developing Privileged Applications.

For highly stringent system security, consider using the Oracle Solaris' Trusted Extensions feature. The Trusted Extensions feature enables system administrators to specify the applications and files that a particular user can access. The Trusted Extensions feature is outside of the scope of this book. See http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/ds/trusted_extensions.jsp for more information.