Re: New LSM patch for consideration

gregat_private

On Tue, Jun 12, 2001 at 01:13:32PM -0400, Stephen Smalley wrote:
> 
> I'm not adverse to moving the capabilities logic into a module,
> although I'm not convinced that it is a hard requirement - the
> NSA folks have a different recollection of what was said at
> the Linux Kernel Summit, and Linus' email doesn't seem to impose
> it as a hard requirement.  But I would like to see the migration
> of the capabilities logic done in a more minimal and cleaner
> way than the current LSM patch, as I've previously proposed
> (e.g. leave existing capable and compute_creds calls untouched,
> separate the capability-specific logic out of ptrace, compute_creds,
> and set*id, leaving the base logic in place).  I particularly want
> to ensure that the base LSM kernel provides reasonable Unix DAC +
> superuser security behavior without any security modules, which isn't the 
> case with the current LSM patch.  It also isn't clear as to whether we
> need to move the capability bits from the task_struct and the linux_binprm
> into the security blobs - Linus' email also seems to leave that door open
> to permit easy composition of other modules with capabilities.  

Heh, two different people, two different interpretations of what was
said :)  Anyone want to listen to the audio of the presentation and see
if they can come up with what was really said?

I think there's no problem with a kernel with no DAC and superuser
security behavior present, if there is no security module present.  The
embedded people want this, it makes the kernel smaller, and possibly a
tiny bit faster.

But I'm not going to argue this any more, I agree that the current
capabilities specific logic is messy, but hey, it's messy logic to start
with, and something has to be done :)

> > What other changes (besides the elf header change) did you see that was
> > left over from Immunix changes, or were irrelevant?  I thought I got all
> > of those out :)
> 
> There is also a sysctl_codomain declaration in include/linux/sysctl.h.

Thanks, now removed.

greg k-h

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