On Mon, 10 Feb 2003 23:38, LA Walsh wrote: > > And modularizing that logic > > has interesting implications; what happens to your applications when > > you turn off the kernel DAC logic and replace it with something > > arbitrary? > > --- > You tell me. The idea is configurability: "truly generic". It > depends on what policy you define. I'm not about to guess > what would happen to "applications" (which? Random?) that _you_ put on > your own system that has a security policy that _you_ define. I think that most people who want to use LSM and similar systems don't want to re-write any significant portion of their applications. People who want serious security and are prepared to re-write applications will probably want a high-assurance kernel and won't use Linux. A large number of applications depend on Unix permission checks. Actions such as treating a file as a configuration file if it lacks execute access (accorting to stat(2)) but trying to execute it if it appears to have execute access is reasonably common. Also many applications check the apparent permissions of files before trying to access them, a file which doesn't appear to have read access may not even be opened. I've been running a SE Linux play machine with all files mode 0777 for a few weeks. I've had to change the permissions on many files to get things working basically for this reason, and I don't think that I've even addressed half the problems this causes. Even as an experiment this is too painful. I'll re-format the machine soon... For all the machines I run (hand-held, laptop, embedded server, desktop, and server) I plan to keep Unix permissions whether I need them or not. Removing them breaks too much compatability at the moment. Maybe if someone else gets a few thousand Linux machines running without any Unix permissions and fixes a lot of the bugs I'll consider it. -- http://www.coker.com.au/selinux/ My NSA Security Enhanced Linux packages http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/ Bonnie++ hard drive benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/postal/ Postal SMTP/POP benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/~russell/ My home page _______________________________________________ linux-security-module mailing list linux-security-moduleat_private http://mail.wirex.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-security-module
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