Balwinder Singh wrote: >I have developed an application, which I believe can provide 100% >security against various attacks.I can hear people laughing. Hmm.. >The applications is called Execution Flow Control (EFC). >Details of software can be found at http://203.197.88.14/efc > This sounds somewhat similar to our SubDomain <http://immunix.org/subdomain.html> product, which profiles applications in terms of what files they may access. It sounds very similar to the approach taken by Systrace <http://www.citi.umich.edu/u/provos/systrace/>, Okena <http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/corp_012403.html> and Entercept <http://www.entercept.com/>, which like EFC, profile applications in terms of which system calls they may invoke. At least Systrace also allows you to profile the arguments presented to syscalls, so you can fake SubDomain's file access control paradigm. This is important, because "touch /etc/pointless" is rather different from "touch /etc/hosts.allow". It is unclear from the EFC documents if EFC supports argument profiling. The advantages of syscall access control: * more expressive: if you know that application Foo has no business calling e.g. mkdir, then you can catch exploits that try to leverage that kind of thing. The advantages of SubDomain: * It is easier to generate a file access profile for an application than a syscall profile. Instead, SubDomain just has a long list of prohibited/dangerous syscalls for confined applications, letting the admin think about important stuff (which files to grant access to) and ignore less important stuff (who cares if *this* app calls getpid?). * Syscall mediation is prone to race conditions inside the kernel if it is implemented using syscall interposition. Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://immunix.com/~crispin/ Chief Scientist, Immunix http://immunix.com http://www.immunix.com/shop/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Aug 15 2003 - 15:08:45 PDT