Re: [patch] [sg]etaffinity hooks

From: Stephen Smalley (sdsat_private)
Date: Wed Oct 09 2002 - 05:50:48 PDT

  • Next message: Crispin Cowan: "Re: [patch] [sg]etaffinity hooks"

    On Wed, 9 Oct 2002, Crispin Cowan wrote:
    
    > That sounds kind of promising ... can you elaborate? I don't see how
    > being able to mess with some other process's affinity does anything
    > other than affect performance. How does this impinge on enforcing
    > mandatory access controls?
    
    I'm not sure that this is fundamentally different than the already
    existing hooks on operations like setpriority/nice.  In any event, for any
    confidentiality policy (e.g. MLS), the affinity masks of processes can be
    used as a channel to leak information in violation of the policy if we
    cannot control setaffinity/getaffinity based on other security attributes
    (e.g. the pair of MLS levels for the two processes).  For an integrity
    policy, you want to be able to control the ability of a process of less
    integrity to tamper with the CPU affinity of a process of greater
    integrity, although the consequence may not be fatal.
    
    --
    Stephen D. Smalley, NAI Labs
    ssmalleyat_private
    
    
    
    _______________________________________________
    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 : Wed Oct 09 2002 - 05:52:28 PDT