MiNT security ?

[Stephen Henson (CSM) <shenson@camborne-school-of-mines.ac.uk>]

With Eric's recent addition of superuser privs needed for Tsetdate etc. (MiNT
1.05), I think a few more additions are needed. Security is a joke without
memory protection anyway. At present *with* memory protection its a joke as
well ...

	Here's a list of functions that immediately spring to mind which
should require root privs to use:

Super(),Rwabs(),Setexc(),Floprd(),Flopwr(),Flopfmt(),Mfpint(),Xbitimer(),
Supexec().

	Roughly speaking, these allow access to supervisor mode, in some
way, or allow manipulation of disk data. Since the device driver installation
calls allow this too, they should be root only as well.

	Others could merely be used to be a pain (!) by resetting certain
info or crashing the system. Some of these are:

Tsetdate(),Tsettime(),Initmous(),Setscreen(),Setpallette(),Setcolor(),Rsconf(),
Keytbl(),Cursconf(),Scrdmp(),Settime(),Jdisint(),Jenabint(),Giaccess(),
Offgibit(),Ongibit(),Dosound(),Setprt(),Kbrate().

	Anyway, no doubt others can think up a few I've missed. Lots of other
ways exist to bypass security with ease, e.g. add your own installable filesys
(which would be on an unprotected TOS partition) or hacked version of MiNT.
This could be got round by allowing MiNT/minixfs to boot from a minix partition
(not as paradoxical as it sounds), which currently can't be done (anyone who
draws the conclusion from this that I would thus want (a) minixfs to be able
to completely replace all tos filesystems (b) become more 'official' and 
(c) get some money for it, can only have my complete assurance that they are
probably right :-) ).
Regards all, Steve.