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Message-Id: <200710192226.53233.agruen@suse.de> Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2007 22:26:53 +0200 From: Andreas Gruenbacher <agruen@...e.de> To: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org> Cc: Thomas Fricaccia <thomas_fricacci@...oo.com>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org Subject: Re: LSM conversion to static interface On Thursday 18 October 2007 04:18, Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Wed, 17 Oct 2007, Thomas Fricaccia wrote: > > > > But then I noticed that, while the LSM would remain in existence, it was > > being closed to out-of-tree security frameworks. Yikes! Since then, > > I've been following the rush to put SMACK, TOMOYO and AppArmor > > "in-tree". > > Yeah, it did come up. Andrew, when he sent it on to me, said that the SuSE > people were ok with it (AppArmor), but I'm with you - I applied it, but > I'm also perfectly willing to unapply it if there actually are valid > out-of-tree users that people push for not merging. The patch doesn't hurt AppArmor, but it's still a step in the wrong direction. Quoting from commit 20510f2f (Convert LSM into a static interface): > In a nutshell, there is no safe way to unload an LSM. The modular interface > is thus unecessary and broken infrastructure. It is used only by > out-of-tree modules, which are often binary-only, illegal, abusive of the > API and dangerous, e.g. silently re-vectoring SELinux. This is idiotic. Just because there is no safe way to unload SELinux - doesn't mean there is no safe way to unload other LSMs: if nothing but that, unloading is handy during development. - doesn't mean that module *loading* is unsafe. The patch removes module loading as well, which hurts more than removing module unloading. LSM can be abused ... so what, this doesn't mean the interface is bad. Non-LSM loadable modules have been known to do lots of bad things, and yet nobody made them non-loadable either (yet). > [...] > For example, I do kind of see the point that a "real" security model might > want to be compiled-in, and not something you override from a module. Non-trivial modules (i.e., practically everything beyond capabilities) become effective only after loading policy, anyway. If you can load policy, you can as well first load a security module without making the system insecure. Thanks, Andreas - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@...r.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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