Darren Moffat

Darren is a Staff Engineer within the Solaris Security Technologies Group (part of Solaris Software). He is involved with various security technologies that comprise core Solaris. Darren started with Sun UK in December 1996 working in Enterprise Services (then SunService) doing Trusted Solaris and general OS security support. He then joined sustaining engineering in Solaris Sofware for NFS/Naming products, before moving to California to join the development teams working on Solaris security.

Before Joining Sun, Darren worked as an analyst/programmer for the UK Ministry of Defence. Moffat is a graduate of the Computing Science Department of Glasgow University.

Darren Moffat's speech will be on the topic of Tuning Unices For Security

An all powerful single user account is often too much power in one persons hands to perform the jobs they need to do. A form of RBAC has been available in versions of Solaris for over 10 years but only became main stream in Solaris 8. Many other systems (including most mainstream GNU/Linux distributions use sudo to achieve a similar goal of giving out only the privleges needed to admin users.

Darrent Moffat will give an overview of some of the areas of compatibility and divergence in some OS security features between Solaris and Linux (RedHat will be the baseline comparison). The main focus will be on RBAC (Role Based Access Control), PAM and Kerberos.

Darren will also discuss some of the technical difficulties in manging open source based components in Solaris (this is NOT a GPL/BSD license rant but is about technical issues).