linux-kernel - Re: [GIT PULL] SELinux patches for v5.8

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Date:   Thu, 4 Jun 2020 08:45:34 -0400
From:   Stephen Smalley <stephen.smalley.work@...il.com>
To:     Casey Schaufler <casey@...aufler-ca.com>
Cc:     James Morris <jmorris@...ei.org>,
        Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Paul Moore <paul@...l-moore.com>,
        SElinux list <selinux@...r.kernel.org>,
        LSM List <linux-security-module@...r.kernel.org>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [GIT PULL] SELinux patches for v5.8

On Wed, Jun 3, 2020 at 6:39 PM Casey Schaufler <casey@...aufler-ca.com> wrote:
>
> On 6/3/2020 3:12 PM, James Morris wrote:
> > On Wed, 3 Jun 2020, Casey Schaufler wrote:
> >
> >> The use of security modules was expected to be rare.
> > This is not correct. Capabilities were ported to LSM and stacked from the
> > beginning, and several major distros worked on LSM so they could ship
> > their own security modules.
>
> Capabilities has always been a special case.
> Until Android adopted SELinux the actual use of LSMs was rare.

I don't think that is correct.  Fedora/RHEL were enabling SELinux by
default since around 2004/2005 and for a while Fedora was tracking
SELinux status as part of their "smolt" hardware profiling project and
SELinux enablement was trending above 80% IIRC before they
de-commissioned smolt. SuSE/SLES and Ubuntu were enabling AppArmor by
default for quite some time too prior to SE Android.  It is certainly
true that Android's adoption of SELinux massively increased the size
of the SELinux install base (and was the first to make SELinux usage
mandatory, not just default-enabled) but I don't think it is accurate
to say that LSM usage was rare prior to that.