Re: How will LSM evolve?

From: Crispin Cowan (crispinat_private)
Date: Mon Apr 08 2002 - 13:51:56 PDT

  • Next message: richard offer: "Re: How will LSM evolve?"

    Charles Levert (LMC) wrote:
    
    >Crispin Cowan wrote:
    >
    >>Your question is well taken. We even had a long discussion on the 
    >>question of keeping LSM hooks up to date WRT kernel evolution at the 
    >>first LSM BoF last summer.
    >>
    >I was at the BoF at USENIX/Sec last summer, although about one hour
    >late from attending another presentation.  If this is the one, I must
    >have missed that specific part.
    >
    There were two BoF's:  USENIX Annual Technical (Boston, June) and USENIX 
    Secuirty (Washington, August).  IIRC, the validation discussion was in 
    Boston.
    
    >>WRT the "status of modules."  Linux has a long-standing policy that 
    >>there is NO guarantee that modules will work across kernel versions. To 
    >>keep your module working between (say) Linux 2.6.17 and 2.6.18, you may 
    >>well have to hack the source to your module as well as re-compile.
    >>
    >From your answer, as well as Chris', I deduce that, from a vendor's
    >perspective, if you want to distribute a given kernel (standard or not),
    >you must distribute everything else (modules) that corresponds to it.
    >Makes sense.
    >
    I had never thought of it that way, but yes I think that's right: if you 
    distribute non-standard kernels, then you had better distribute custom 
    modules with it.
    
    LSM (technology and project) was designed to solve the opposite problem: 
    allowing people with non-standard security toys to distribute modules 
    that will work with standard kernels, e.g. so that SELinux can build a 
    module that "just works" with whatever kernel Red Hat is shipping at the 
    time.
    
    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
    



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon Apr 08 2002 - 14:53:33 PDT