However, they are less likely to use more intrusive functionality, such as the confidentiality and integrity-oriented mandatory access policies that will be implemented. It is the intent of the TrustedBSD project to make almost all code developed for TrustedBSD available as part of the base FreeBSD operating system. However, specific advantages, as described above, include the ability to more generally specify permissions on files and allow users to more easily manage resources and to be able to run far less code with root privileges. As such, administrators taking advantage of this functionality will be able to run a more secure system. A recent paper from Argus Systems, a commercial provider of trusted extensions for Solaris, described how use of mandatory integrity policies could have protected against the recent penetration of the Apache Project s Web server.
Improved security is almost always a tradeoff against improved usability.
That said, one important goal of TrustedBSD is to make the feature set of a trusted operating system easily accessible to users of a widely distributed free operating system. Any changes in system behavior will require administrators to understand the differences, but in most cases the differences will not be as substantial. Administrators will need to learn how to read, manipulate and back up ACLs on files and understand how capabilities on files behave. However, features such as fine-granularity auditing require creation and management of large quantities of data. Performance-sensitive sites may wish to avoid using some features, such as auditing, as a result.