Re: [RFC] [Stacking v4 2/3] New version of SELinux patch to support stacking

From: Stephen Smalley (sds@private)
Date: Thu Dec 09 2004 - 06:46:23 PST


Hi,

The discussion of bprm_apply_creds reminded me of another issue with
respect to stacking: the holding of task_lock(current) across the
bprm_apply_creds() call.  Currently, SELinux invokes the secondary_ops
hook first and then performs its own checking and task security
structure update, and then releases the task lock prior to performing
the rest of its processing, as we do not need the task lock for the rest
of the processing and holding for that processing would introduce
additional nesting of locks that is undesirable.  Then, prior to
returning, SELinux re-takes the task lock so that everything works
smoothly when compute_creds tries to release it.

This becomes a problem if you want to stack another module with SELinux
via stacker that also performs processing in bprm_apply_creds() and
relies on the unsafe flags, as they may no longer be accurate due to the
temporary dropping of the task lock by SELinux.  You essentially have to
make SELinux the last module in the stacker chain to make that safe. 
But that is difficult given that SELinux must be built-in, unless there
is an explicit way for SELinux to ask to be placed last (e.g. a priority
for registration) or stacker knows that SELinux should always go last.

The other option would be to split the bprm_apply_creds hook into two
separate hooks, and only hold the task lock across the first hook call,
moving the SELinux processing that doesn't require the task lock into
the second hook function.  The first hook would need to pass back some
state to the caller to propagate to the second hook.  In the case of
SELinux, we would need to pass the information needed to perform the
avc_audit() calls for the share and ptrace checks.  That would certainly
be cleaner, but again introduces a situation where we are making two
separate hook calls at the same call site.

-- 
Stephen Smalley <sds@private>
National Security Agency



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