Trent Jaeger wrote: >We have been working on tools for verifying the placement of LSM hooks >(that I spoke of at the USENIX Security BoF, and will be reporting on >shortly), and we found that less than 20% of the LSM security hooks are >actually invoked by lmbench. Therefore, lmbench is not a suitable >benchmark for hook placement verification (i.e., do the hooks protect the >dangerous operations in the kernel properly). > I agree: lmbench is not suitable for hook placement verification. It's goals are different. LMBench seeks to measure the relative performance of operating systems and hardware. To that end, lmbench concentrates on the "fast path" (commonly used) features of the OS. Security is a completely different sort of problem, where you need to get anal about corner cases. So it seems pretty likely to me that lmbench would have relatively light coverage of LSM hooks. But thanks for the data. >We also tried the SAINT >vulnerability checking tool and found only a slightly greater coverage. > This also doesn't surprise me much, as SAINT is just probing for commonly known vulnerabilities in applications. It also is not going to push the kernel's corner cases. >For the time being we have pushed the coverage benchmark problem on the >stack. If any of you have any ideas, we would appreciate them. > That's unfortunate. My main "idea" is that we need a new tool for this :-) Such a tool might start with something like lmbench as a basis, but would need to be substantially enhanced to be useful. However, it might be easier to catch most of the corner cases with a kernel compatibility test coverage tool, such as the Open Group's LSB-VSX tool http://www.opengroup.org/testing/lsb-test/lsb-vsx.html 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 _______________________________________________ linux-security-module mailing list linux-security-moduleat_private http://mail.wirex.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-security-module
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