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System administrators have unlimited access to system resources. As the Snowden case highlighted, these permissions can be exploited to steal valuable personal, classified, or commercial data. This problem is exacerbated when a third party administers the system. For example, a bank outsourcing its IT would not want to allow administrators access to the actual data. We propose WatchIT: a strategy that constrains IT personnel's view of the system and monitors their actions. To this end, we introduce the abstraction of perforated containers -- while regular Linux containers are too restrictive to be used by system administrators, by "punching holes" in them, we strike a balance between information security and required administrative needs. Following the principle of least privilege, our system predicts which system resources should be accessible for handling each IT issue, creates a perforated container with the corresponding isolation, and deploys it as needed for fixing the problem.
Shalev et al. (Thu,) studied this question.