Re: Design scope of a security policy module

From: Crispin Cowan (crispinat_private)
Date: Mon Nov 04 2002 - 22:12:00 PST

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    Chris Wright wrote:
    
    >Of course, to date, this is exactly the type of thing that has been
    >called policy and punted to the security module.  The framework is
    >intended to be as thin as possible (read: dumb) and pushes all sense of
    >policy to the module.
    >
    I agree with Chris. LSM was designed to push as much policy as possible 
    out of the LSM interface itself and into the modules. This design was 
    deliberate, precisely because of a lack of consensus as to what the 
    nature of security policies should be. LSM's goal is to provide a common 
    API for access control policy engines, not to provide any policies of 
    its own.
    
    As is, LSM is already capturing a great deal of common work that used to 
    be duplicated among many security enhancing systems, in that they do not 
    each have to implement and chronically forward-port their hooks into the 
    Linux kernel.
    
    To further capture common function, the obvious solution is for modules 
    to share code. Many modules are GPL'd, so you can just copy and modify 
    them as you see fit, so long as your resulting module is also GPL'd.
    
    Further, there is the Stacker module, which is intended to allow more 
    than one module to be loaded into the kernel at once. This allows one 
    module to depend on another to implement needed functionality.
    
    Your proposals sound like worth-while policies to implement as a module, 
    although I confess I do not yet fully understand them. But they 
    definitely do not belong in the LSM interface. We have gone to a lot of 
    effort to keep the LSM interface policy-neutral.
    
    Crispin
    
    -- 
    Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
    Chief Scientist, WireX                      http://wirex.com/~crispin/
    Security Hardened Linux Distribution:       http://immunix.org
    Available for purchase: http://wirex.com/Products/Immunix/purchase.html
    
    
    
    

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