01
Hardware and Operating Systems
Counting item by item the boundaries a single machine draws: the boundary and boot chain carried by hardware components, the security model difference between operating system families, the items a clean install closes and fails to close, the point where two permission models diverge on the same access request, the difference in the trace left by two management forms, and the elimination power of a troubleshooting sequence.
- 01 Computer Hardware Components Reading hardware as a list of boundaries: the boundary drawn by eight components across a 43-item inventory, the number of items that must be simultaneously wrong to cross a boundary ranging from 1 to 3 over remote access and 0 to 3 over physical access, two components opening the entire inventory on their own, and the opened item count staying at 43 even after three of four hardening settings are turned on.
- 02 Operating System Families Operating system families told apart by their security model rather than their product name: 14 system requests giving a different result across three families in 4, 11, and 12 items, crossing the admin boundary costing 1, 2, and 3 items, the requests reached once the boundary falls being 13, 9, and 5, and the requests unreachable even as admin rising to 1, 1, and 9.
- 03 Installation and Configuration Measuring the clean install itself: 17 of 20 configuration items staying risky by default, baseline hardening closing 8 of them, 4 closing only by reinstalling, and 1 never closing; when hardening happens before connecting to the network, the open items in the window drop from 17 to 9, and to 5 once later items are closed too.
- 04 File Permissions and Ownership Running the same 70 access requests through two permission models: the permission-bits model's loose expression producing 6 excess grants, its strict expression 6 excess denials, the two expressions differing from each other in 12 requests, the access control list expressing the policy in full yet 6 requests flipping when the entry order changes, and ownership sitting outside both models.
- 05 Graphical Interface and Command Line Counting the trace the same ten management jobs leave in two management forms: the graphical interface and the command line tying at 11 items appearing in the audit trail, three jobs leaving no trace at all in either form, the reproducible job count needing a script and a repository to rise from 0 to 10, and manual operations across forty machines dropping from 400 to 10.
- 06 Troubleshooting Method Measuring troubleshooting by its elimination count: over 16 possibilities and 8 tests, the info-priority sequence finishing in an average of 3.50 steps against the list sequence's 5.81, the worst-case step count being 6 against 8, the step count that eliminates nothing coming out to 0 against 22, and two causes that no test can tell apart.