Re: Names vs. Inodes

From: Crispin Cowan (crispinat_private)
Date: Fri Jul 20 2001 - 23:59:15 PDT

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    David Wagner wrote:
    
    > Crispin Cowan  wrote:
    > >In SubDomain, we need to know the absolute path name of a file that a
    > >process is trying to open.
    >
    > Would you consider the following strategy?  If you want to support
    > denying access to all pathnames that match /var/log/*,
    
    To correct an (apparently common todya) misconception, SubDomain does not
    deny access to specified names.  SubDomain grants access to specified
    names, and denies access to everything else.  This is a subtle but
    important consideration with respect to the validity of denying access to a
    file based on its name, when in fact the file could be aliased under a
    different name with a hard link.
    
    
    > then rather than
    > trying to reconstruct the pathname to open() and pattern-matching, maybe
    > one alternative could be to monitor the directory traversal (is this
    > lookup_dentry() or somesuch?) and deny access preemptorily as soon as
    > you see an access to the directory "/var/log".
    
    We thought of that.  It results in a huge "hematoma of reimplementation"
    (in the terminology of Gregor Kiczales
    http://www.parc.xerox.com/csl/groups/sda/projects/oi/ieee-software/ ) where
    we end up building a shadow file system name space in kernel data
    structures.  I'm skeptical that such a thing can be done with sufficient
    correctness that it will be secure.
    
    So how is Janus going to handle this?
    
    Crispin
    
    --
    Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
    Chief Scientist, WireX Communications, Inc. http://wirex.com
    Security Hardened Linux Distribution:       http://immunix.org
    Available for purchase: http://wirex.com/Products/Immunix/purchase.html
    
    
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