Talk:Mandatory access control

message: Made the introduction clearer and more relavant.  
The claim that MAC has a goal of defining an architecture was not made clear.  This needs to come out.  
The references to FLASK and Generalized Framework for Access Control (GFAC) architectures seem to pursue an agenda that lacks relavance.  This needs to come out. 
Comments?
John 18:31, 27 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Untitled comment 

message: This article is gibberish to someone, unless they already know what MAC is! KeithCu 00:36, 6 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Gibberish is not good.  Can you clarify what parts were unclear?  More specific comments would be helpful. John 20:02, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

text: KeithCu, are you referring to the material that was added just after 2006-10-24?  I do find that text fairly bureaucratic, and it seems to assume a lot of prior context. Ka-Ping Yee 10:45, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Tried to add some prior context regarding the 'hidden' implication of high robustness underlying the term MAC.  Is that better or worse? John 05:42, 11 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Much worse -- see above. --DavidHopwood (talk) 21:19, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Help! 

message: I completely rewrote the introduction, giving it less of an MLS flavor.  I tried to focus on what MAC actually is and what it does, and how it differs from DAC.  I noted the historical association with MLS, but also more recent developments.
I deleted the "MAC Precludes Informal Access Decisions" section (which I felt was just wrong -- see "Change the focus of the article" comment for the reasoning) and made a couple minor edits to other sections.  However, the rest of the article is still limited to the narrow MLS focus (maybe it should be moved in its entirety to the MLS page?).  For this reason, I kept the cleanup tag. 
--Gdlong (talk) 19:47, 29 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rewrote introduction 

message: DAC is a different topic and could be a link in SEE ALSO but has absolutely no business being the beginning of the article (after prologue) of MAC.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.219.201.25 (talk) 14:37, 17 August 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Please move the DAC OUT of the article 

message: The History section reads at best like brain storming and at worst like a disorganized rant, besides the many spelling mistakes. If anyone knowledgeable could maybe rewrite it? -- 89.182.155.123 (talk) 08:44, 19 August 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Please rewrite "thesible" "privelage" rant 

message: In special the recent additions are completely unrelated to the topic and just make a nice joke, see e.g.: "heated transistor tubes".... It seems to be a good idea to remove most of the current text in the article. Schily (talk) 08:45, 19 August 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: I deleted all that. Indeed, it's as if no one who cares is watching this article.  The only reason I'm here is that the editor who added that nonsense showed up in another page I'm watching and I was curious as to what else it had done. No doubt I'll get some blowback... Jeh (talk) 06:59, 19 September 2015 (UTC)
replies: text:  Thank you for mentioning that idea! I sometimes check for other edits by the same person, but in this case I did not. Schily (talk) 09:15, 6 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  This is one of the worst articles I ever saw on WP 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: This article was never that great, but it's become worse due to some edits over the past couple years.  First, while the introduction section talks about what access control is (in the context of MAC), it says nothing about the mandatory part. Second, MAC has long been associated with MLS.  If you look at the history of this article, you'll see that it was uniquely about MLS for a long time, and still retains that flavor.  That is a really important piece of contextual information, and anyone who is interested in MAC should know that from the very beginning.  Third, much of the MLS-related information is redundant and not coherent, especially in the subsequent sections.
:: I tried to fix many of these issues by bringing back and condensing some of the information that used to be there, but you reverted the edits.  Not sure why - did you read them?  If not, I'll go through them one-by-one:
*Added a paragraph in the introduction to discuss the mandatory nature of mandatory access control.  My reasoning is, as I said before, it's called mandatory access control, and there should be some description of what the "mandatory" part means. Also, I understand what someone previously said about this not being an article about DAC, but it's much easier to understand the mandatory nature by contrasting it with discretionary, which is the other form of access control.  (And by the way, something very similar to that paragraph used to be in the introduction - someone moved it to a different section in such a way that it worsened the article IMO.)
* Added another paragraph in the introduction to provide the context of MAC - saying that it was historically associated with MLS, but that association has become weaker as MAC mechanisms are being deployed in mainstream OS's.  This is key information if you want to understand anything about MAC.  Again, that information used to be in there, but bit-by-bit it got removed over the years.
*Cleaned up the section titled 'Implications of the term mandatory', which applies only to MAC in the MLS context.  
# Retitled it from "Implications of the term mandatory" to "Historical Background and Implications for Multi-level Security", and brought back a paragraph that gave some historical background so that the reader understands (1) that we're talking about MAC in the context of MLS, and (2) why we're doing so.
#  This section had been edited by several people and says the same thing over and over in different ways, as if one person didn't look at what was already there, or (more likely) paragraphs were moved into that section without trying to merge them with what was already there.  So I merged that information and condensed three paragraphs into one.
# It contained various opinions, such as "vendors claiming to enforce MAC are sometimes making claims beyond their capability".  That sentence/phrase was originally added more than 10 years ago, is no longer relevant, and never had any support or evidence.  I am personally familiar with MLS and attempts to implement MAC in that context, and I understand why that claim was made (it isn't entirely false, or wasn't 20 years ago), but I don't think it belongs in a wikipedia article.  So I removed the parts where some original author claimed that vendors don't know what they're doing.  However, that concept still remains due to the sentence "This is a tall order and sometimes assumed unrealistic by those unfamiliar with high assurance strategies, and very difficult for those who are."  I don't know who wrote that, but it is correct.
* In the "Degrees of MAC system strength", section, the statement "This (that all users have clearances for all data) is not necessarily true of a MAC system" is incorrect.  It is true for MLS systems by definition of MLS, but not necessarily true for MAC (which is used to create/enforce MLS).  So I changed MAC to MLS.  There's a lot more cleanup that can/should be done to that section, but I left it alone for now. Gdlong (talk) 18:43, 24 June 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Per WP:BRD the sequence is supposed to be "be bold; someone reverts; discuss". Not "be bold; someone reverts; you revert back; discuss". Jeh (talk) 23:40, 24 June 2016 (UTC)

text: If you don't like it, change it.  But do it because the of the content, don't revert simply because "you can't slurp stuff around like that" - that's not a valid reason.  I think these changes have improved the article for the reasons discussed above, but if you and/or others disagree, then by all means revert or modify some (or even all) of the changes.  But if you do, I think you should offer at least some explanation of why you think the previous version was better.   Gdlong (talk) 05:06, 25 June 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Missing some key context, background, and definition 

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message: This article doesn't even mention labels. What am I missing? If labels are discussed in another article, there needs to be a clear link to it. If anyone came to this page looking for information about labels, they would be very disappointed. debater (talk) 23:15, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Labels