Re: Low-level network hooks and rtnetlink

From: James Morris (jmorrisat_private)
Date: Thu Aug 09 2001 - 23:21:14 PDT

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    On Mon, 6 Aug 2001, James Morris wrote:
    
    >
    > Also, after further investigation of option #3 from my last post, it looks
    > like it will be a very messy job to hook all accesses to low-level network
    > objects at some level underneath both ioctl() and rtnetlink.  I haven't
    > come up with a good solution for this yet.
    >
    
    After looking at this issue in some detail and coding up a prototype for
    netdevices, I'm now certain that it will be very difficult to add
    consistent fine-grained access controls for these low-level network
    objects.
    
    Because of the TOCTTOU ioctl issue, we'd end up with hooks scattered at
    many layers in the stack (down into the hardware drivers for some
    netdevice ioctls such as SIOCETHTOOL), which is quite invasive.
    
    We then need similarly-grained hooks for rtnetlink messages and various
    /proc access points, which is technicaly possible, but increasingly
    invasive and looking like a potential maintenance nightmare.  The latter
    is especially not good for a security project.
    
    Also, I'm not sure how generally useful it would to provide more
    granularity than CAP_NET_ADMIN for these kinds of objects.
    
    Stehpen, can selinux make do with just this level of granularity?
    
    Are there any other projects which might need more?
    
    I'd like to propose that we kill the ioctl() calls in netdev_ops, and use
    the existing CAP_NET_ADMIN checks for controlling access to: netdevices,
    routing tables, neighbour operations (e.g. ARP) and packet
    schedulers/classifiers.
    
    
    - James
    -- 
    James Morris
    <jmorrisat_private>
    
    
    
    
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