Re: [PATCH] remove sys_security

From: Crispin Cowan (crispinat_private)
Date: Mon Oct 21 2002 - 14:12:50 PDT

  • Next message: Greg KH: "Re: [PATCH] remove sys_security"

    Alan Cox wrote:
    
    >On Thu, 2002-10-17 at 21:10, Greg KH wrote:
    >  
    >
    >>Ok, I think it's time for someone who actually cares about the security
    >>syscall to step up here to try to defend the existing interface.  I'm
    >>pretty sure Ericsson, HP, SELinux, and WireX all use this, so they need
    >>to be the ones defending it.
    >>    
    >>
    >The existing interface is basically the one Linus asked for, although
    >perhaps with a little less thought on the structure side than it would
    >have benefitted
    >
    The intent behind the syscall interface was that it needed to be generic 
    enough to support the 50+ syscalls that SELinux wants, and also be 
    generic enough to support potential modules that have not been invented 
    yet. That's why it is a MUX, and why the signature definition is enough 
    to deal with stacked modules and then pass a generic argv list to the 
    module itself.
    
    Unfortunately, this design goal (highly generic interface) is 
    incompatible with the 32/64 bit transparancy layer that several 
    supported architectures need. As Christoph says, this is unfixable. 
    IMHO, it is unfixable because of conflicting design goals: you cannot 
    have a truly generic syscall interface and hope for it to port clean 
    from 32 bits to 64 bits.
    
    Therefore, the sys_security syscall has been removed. LSM-aware 
    applications that want to talk to security modules can do so through a 
    file system interface. This will work for WireX, and Smalley says it 
    will work for SELinux. I hope it will work for others.
    
    Again, my thanks for eveyone's help in cleaning up this issue, and my 
    apologies to anyone I may have offended. We should have thought about 
    the 32/64 bit issue when we defined that interface. Kudos to Greg K-H, 
    who told me that this syscall would be a problem.
    
    Thanks,
        Crispin
    
    
    

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