History
The original formulation is from Jerome Saltzer:
Every program and every privileged user of the system should operate using the least amount of privilege necessary to complete the job. —Peter J. Denning, in his paper "Fault Tolerant Operating Systems", set it in a broader perspective among four fundamental principles of fault tolerance.
Dynamic assignments of privileges was earlier discussed by Roger Needham in 1972.
Historically, the oldest instance of least privilege is probably the source code of login.c, which begins execution with super-user permissions and—the instant they are no longer necessary—dismisses them via setuid with a non-zero argument.
Read more about this topic: Principle Of Least Privilege
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.”
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“Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.”
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“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
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—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)