linux-kernel - Re: Upstream first policy

lists.openwall.net		lists / announce owl-users owl-dev john-users john-dev passwdqc-users yescrypt popa3d-users / oss-security kernel-hardening musl sabotage tlsify passwords / crypt-dev xvendor / Bugtraq Full-Disclosure linux-kernel linux-netdev linux-ext4 linux-hardening linux-cve-announce PHC
Open Source and information security mailing list archives

Hash Suite: Windows password security audit tool. GUI, reports in PDF.

[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]

Date:	Mon, 8 Mar 2010 17:30:08 +0000
From:	Alan Cox <alan@...rguk.ukuu.org.uk>
To:	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>
Cc:	James Morris <jmorris@...ei.org>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Kyle McMartin <kyle@...artin.ca>,
	Alexander Viro <viro@....linux.org.uk>
Subject: Re: Upstream first policy

> In that sense it appears to me that it's pretty much a universal truth that 
> 'pathnames' are a far more fitting abstraction to any 'human based security 

Ingo - just about all the serious security work disagrees with you.
Pathnames are references to objects and keep changing. What matters is
the object itself. This is also how Unix has always worked

Imagine if chmod applied to the path not the inode ?

> Also, why was/(is?) AppArmor considered as a 'hostile competitor' 

I don't believe it was. It was perceived as a technical failure, and then
the file system people shredded the bits the security folks didn't.

There are certain things path name bases security works quite nicely for,
primarily systems that have no concept of links. It's why it works
ok-ish for httpd but for the general case nobody has ever really made it
work properly.

Alan
--
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/