Network Security First-Step, Second Edition

Corporate Policies and Trust

Trust is a central theme in many aspects of security and must be foremost in your mind when discussing security policies. In a perfect world, there would be no issues with trust; you would trust everyone, and they would always do the right thing. Unfortunately, that is not realistic, nor does it take into account other factors, such as bugs in network resources. Again, trusting the resources on your network would be great, but remember that buggy hardware and software is commonplace in networking.

A security policy can be written with the belief that no one in an organization is to be trusted; however, that would not likely work. It is a well-known fact that users circumvent policies that are too restrictive. For ...