Re: TPE diff against 2.6.8 with 2.6.9-rc3 patches

From: Niki Rahimi (niki.rahimi@private)
Date: Wed Oct 13 2004 - 10:39:04 PDT


Sorry all. I thought I had replied to Stephen's earlier note but it
only went to Serge. I will definitely start looking into the mmap hook
for the bypass problem. Any other opinions as far as the rest of the
module on a whole?

Thanks,
Niki


On Wed, 13 Oct 2004 09:39:55 -0700, Crispin Cowan <crispin@private> wrote:
> Stephen Smalley wrote:
> 
> >On Tue, 2004-10-12 at 19:57, Crispin Cowan wrote:
> >
> >
> >>"untrusted" does not mean what you think it means :) In this case,
> >>substitute "clueless" or "careless" in place of "untrusted". The purpose
> >>is a pathology-preventer to prevent sloppy users from accidentally
> >>executing Trojan code inserted by a malicious user.
> >>
> >>
> >Hmmm...that doesn't seem consistent with the original Phrack TPE
> >article, the Stephanie TPE page, or the Linux TPE kernel module page
> >(pre-LSM).  They all describe a threat model that includes preventing
> >malicious users from downloading exploit code and running it on the
> >machine.
> >
> >
> /me thinks about it some more
> 
> Ok, I see how it could provide that property.
> 
> >In any event, given that LSM does provide hooks for mmap and mprotect,
> >it hardly seems unreasonable for the TPE LSM to apply execute checking
> >there as well to avoid trivial bypass, and possibly to make use of the
> >LSM bprm_secureexec hook to prevent use of sensitive LD_* variables by
> >the untrusted user.  That still won't address the interpreter problem,
> >which should be noted in the documentation.  The Phrack article and the
> >Stephanie TPE implementation took different approaches to trying to
> >solve that problem, nothing very satisfying.
> >
> >
> That also makes sense to me. But I'm not the one doing the work :)
> 
> 
> 
> Crispin
> 
> --
> Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.  http://immunix.com/~crispin/
> CTO, Immunix          http://immunix.com
> 
>



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