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Permissions and Security Documentation


I would like to bring to your attention, or maybe better put, to
complain about your statement within your CYGWIN User Documentation
section on Permissions and Security. We here at General Dynamics Weather
Systems Engineering are inclined to use CYGWIN as opposed to INTERIX for
porting our existing weather information server software to the NT
environment (from Solaris). We believe CYGWIN will result in a faster
implementation and faster execution of processing when the port is
complete. However, our primary customer is the US government (Department
of Defense/Air Force/etc). The second to last last sentence of your
verbiage on the Permissions and Security states:
" For this reason, it is not appropriate to use Cygwin in high security
applications".

I believe this statement is a disservice to CYGWIN and is in fact,
depending upon the situation, totally false. The term "high security" is
ambiguous at best, subjective at least. The appropriateness of use of
applications in a secure environment considers many factors, including
risk. If a server is within a locked down facility, only one "user" can
access it at a time, and all other services are Web Based, then I
believe this "vulnerability" within a Secret or Classified/Sensitive
environment is in the worst case, minimal. Statements like this one may
prevent us and many other vendors from delivering CYGWIN to ANY
government agency. The fact is that all agencies of the government, even
within an unclassified environment, are increasingly sensitive to
statements such as this. There presence makes all other reasoning
hopeless.

I would humbly request that the sentence be stricken from your web
page/documentation. It would help us and I believe it would help CYGWIN
as well.


Thanks,

Buddy Carter
General Dynamics
Weather Systems Engineering



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