User:SchrodingersRoot/Origins

Schrödinger's Root's Origins
I've been asked many times what my pseudonym means. So I'll take the opportunity here to provide an explanation. As a disclaimer, for the purposes of this explication, I will be deliberately oversimplifying concepts of quantum mechanics and information security for illustrative purposes. Moreover, the psuedonym is not meant to exactly reflect the characterization and nature of quantum mechanics, but merely serve as an analogue.

Firstly, Schrodinger refers to Erwin Schrödinger, a Nobel Prize winning physicist who made major contributions to quantum mechanics. Specifically, in my case, the prefix is a referent to Schrödinger's cat, an important and illustrative thought experiment concerning probability wavefunctions. The essence of the thought experiment is that, according to the current model of quantum mechanics, with a Copenhagen interpretation, if one puts a cat in a box, and create a situation whereby the cat lives or dies based on a quantum event (e.g. radioactive decay), then until one opens the box to see if the cat is alive or dead (and thereby collapsing the wavefunction to an event), the cat exists in all possible states (i.e. a quantum superposition--the cat is both alive and dead simultaneously).

Root refers to the highest level administrative account (superuser) in a Linux or Unix computer system.

It originated during a Information Security class, in a discussion of security models. Specifically, the Bell-LaPadula model of security, which has to do with the restriction of information flow. In summary format, the Bell-LaPadula model requires that information only flow 'up' a security hierarchy. The effect of this is that an object can read anything at its own level or lower, and can write to anything its own level or higher (the word object here refers to people, processes, organizations, etc). If objects were able to write to lower levels, then they could write information that is only supposed to be available to higher level object. This means, however, that with a strict enforcement, a higher level object cannot communicate with a lower level object, since it is unable to write to a lower level. This, obviously, presents a problem, especially in situations involving the highest level of security access in a particular system (e.g. a computer administrator). The traditional solution to this is the artificial, temporary 'forgetting' of sensitive information, and 'demotion', to be able to write to lower levels.

I thought my solution to be more elegant, if less practical. Instead of demotions and promotions, I feel that the superuser (root) should exist in a superposition of all possible states, resolving to a particular (appropriate) security level when queried, resulting in complete access privileges. Now, obviously, this would involve the directed collapsing of a wavefunction, but I'm not worried about that.