From: Andrew R. <an...@ae...> - 2007-12-07 04:03:22
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Well all, I've been putting in some good time/code into trustees the last few weeks. I've cleaned up the code quite a bit, especially the hashing code which has always been unstable (although I think I HAD finally stabilized it) and messy. I also put together a testsuite which works pretty well, and has enabled me to find and track down other bugs. In fact, on the experimental branch, I'd just put up a fix (not ready for use yet) a few weeks ago for the last real remaining security issue related to nested trustees (a security issue that has been around since the first trustees). I had been doing all my work against 2.6.23. Tonight, I had just upgraded my kernel to 2.6.24-rc4 only to find that commit: commit 20510f2f4e2dabb0ff6c13901807627ec9452f98 Author: James Morris <jm...@na...> Date: Tue Oct 16 23:31:32 2007 -0700 security: Convert LSM into a static interface In short, the Linux Security Module(LSM) API is no longer available for kernel modules. This is *bad*. I have a strong suspicion that there is no chance trustees will ever make it into the mainline kernel due to its complete disregard for standard unix permissions, the ACL system, and in some ways it abuses the spirit of the LSM API (LSM was intended to take rights away for the most part, not grant them). So there's really only a handful of options here. a.) target an older kernel b.) maintain a full git fork of the kernel (this makes the maintenance burden much higher, although would be the road to mainline kernel acceptance, which IMO won't ever happen). This also potentially makes it much more difficult to get trustees going against distro-supplied kernel source. c.) ??? I'm pretty much out of ideas. Thoughts on what any of you would prefer? Cheers, Andy P.S. This could be much worse, the selinux guys are keen on them becoming the *only* LSM project. In fact, I believe there was a big push from them a few months ago to actually *remove* LSM and put just selinux in its place. As a person on #kernelnewbies said just a few minutes ago as I was asking for suggestions regarding this dilemma: 21:44 < zakalwe> right now an army of redhat and nsa employees are mobilising to smack your idea into oblivion. you better be wearing a flame proof suit. -- Andrew Ruder <an...@ae...> http://www.aeruder.net |