Re: Security initializer bugs

sdsat_private

On Wed, 2003-04-09 at 10:28, Mike Wray wrote:
> The current implementation does not agree with the documentation in
> security.h - which states that the relevant security fields are
> nulled on allocation. In these cases they are not. So the implementation
> is not consistent with the documentation. That's what I call a bug.

A bug in the documentation.  Or more precisely, a failure to update the
documentation to reflect changes to the code.

> Either the implementation needs fixing to do what the documentation says,
> or the documentation needs fixing to document what has been implemented.

Yes, the documentation should be fixed.

> Since the other security fields are in fact initialised to NULL it
> would be more consistent to fix the implementation to agree with
> the documentation, rather than making special cases for these 2 structs.

I'd expect it to migrate the other direction, i.e. all of the NULL
initialization will migrate into the alloc_security hook functions.  
As a side note, the security fields in these two structs and the
corresponding hooks have all been definitively rejected for 2.5 (in case
you missed that discussion).  So they simply don't exist in mainline
2.5.

> I apologize if the code I sent is not an acceptable implementation,
> but other LSM code already had #ifdef CONFIG_SECURITY_NETWORK in it.
> For example 'net/core/skbuff.c' has it round 'skb->lsm_security = NULL;'
> for similar reasons.

That was a case where the base kernel code already had #ifdef's and
where the initialization was separated from the alloc_security hook
call.  Also, note that in 2.5, changes to skb allocation have yielded a
corresponding change, so the initialization has been moved into the hook
in the lsm-2.5 tree.  As a side note, note that the skb security field
and hooks were also definitively rejected for mainline 2.5.

-- 
Stephen Smalley <sdsat_private>
National Security Agency

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