Re: permissive vs. restrictive issue and solutions...

From: David Wagner (dawat_private)
Date: Fri Jun 01 2001 - 11:24:19 PDT

  • Next message: jmjonesat_private: "Re: permissive vs. restrictive issue and solutions..."

    Chris Wright  wrote:
    >2. Maintain current set of hooks and push logic out of the kernel and into
    >the module to avoid placing hooks in compound conditionals.  
    
    By the way, let me expand on why I'm concerned about this approach.
    Basically, it makes reasoning about correctness hard.
    
    One of the goals of Janus was to make the assurance argument very simple.
    The non-LSM version has a very simple assurance argument: If an operation
    is denied before Janus is installed, then it will for sure be denied
    when Janus is in place; therefore, Janus can't make security any worse
    than it already was.
    
    This assurance argument is very easy to verify in the non-LSM version
    of Janus, because the interfaces themselves don't permit 'permissive'
    extensions to the base security policy: one can easily see just by the
    interfaces (without diving into the implementation behind the interface)
    that Janus is a purely 'restrictive' extension.
    
    Now I know that this assurance argument is going to inevitably become
    harder to verify with a LSM, but if we follow option #2, things really
    get nasty.  To verify the assurance claim, one must examine all code
    *and verify that it includes a proper cut-and-pasted version of the base
    kernel logic*.  Such verification is non-trivial, and my motto is that
    if it is non-trivial, it is probably wrong.
    
    That's why I'm not so fond of #2.  Quite possibly #2 is the best among
    several bad choices, and if so, so be it.  Nonetheless, I wanted to list
    these issues in advance so that nothing is overlooked.
    
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