5. Safety and protection

The use of IT in a growing number of applications involving the integrity of information, people and goods is giving ever greater weight to security issues. The term security refers to the ability of an IT system to meet specified requirements in terms of information integrity and confidentiality, and proper use of services. The term protection refers to all the mechanisms (hardware, software, regulatory) implemented in a computer system to ensure security.

Security and protection issues in IT go beyond the strict confines of operating systems. After an overview of some security risks and the policies designed to avoid them, we describe some of the protection mechanisms provided by operating systems.