Date:   Wed, 5 Aug 2020 09:03:31 -0400
From:   Stephen Smalley <stephen.smalley.work@...il.com>
To:     Mimi Zohar <zohar@...ux.ibm.com>
Cc:     Lakshmi Ramasubramanian <nramas@...ux.microsoft.com>,
        Casey Schaufler <casey@...aufler-ca.com>,
        Tyler Hicks <tyhicks@...ux.microsoft.com>, sashal@...nel.org,
        James Morris <jmorris@...ei.org>,
        linux-integrity@...r.kernel.org,
        SElinux list <selinux@...r.kernel.org>,
        LSM List <linux-security-module@...r.kernel.org>,
        linux-kernel <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v6 1/4] IMA: Add func to measure LSM state and policy

On Wed, Aug 5, 2020 at 8:57 AM Mimi Zohar <zohar@...ux.ibm.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 2020-08-05 at 08:46 -0400, Stephen Smalley wrote:
> > On 8/4/20 11:25 PM, Mimi Zohar wrote:
> >
> > > Hi Lakshmi,
> > >
> > > There's still  a number of other patch sets needing to be reviewed
> > > before my getting to this one.  The comment below is from a high level.
> > >
> > > On Tue, 2020-08-04 at 17:43 -0700, Lakshmi Ramasubramanian wrote:
> > > > Critical data structures of security modules need to be measured to
> > > > enable an attestation service to verify if the configuration and
> > > > policies for the security modules have been setup correctly and
> > > > that they haven't been tampered with at runtime. A new IMA policy is
> > > > required for handling this measurement.
> > > >
> > > > Define two new IMA policy func namely LSM_STATE and LSM_POLICY to
> > > > measure the state and the policy provided by the security modules.
> > > > Update ima_match_rules() and ima_validate_rule() to check for
> > > > the new func and ima_parse_rule() to handle the new func.
> > > I can understand wanting to measure the in kernel LSM memory state to
> > > make sure it hasn't changed, but policies are stored as files.  Buffer
> > > measurements should be limited  to those things that are not files.
> > >
> > > Changing how data is passed to the kernel has been happening for a
> > > while.  For example, instead of passing the kernel module or kernel
> > > image in a buffer, the new syscalls - finit_module, kexec_file_load -
> > > pass an open file descriptor.  Similarly, instead of loading the IMA
> > > policy data, a pathname may be provided.
> > >
> > > Pre and post security hooks already exist for reading files.   Instead
> > > of adding IMA support for measuring the policy file data, update the
> > > mechanism for loading the LSM policy.  Then not only will you be able
> > > to measure the policy, you'll also be able to require the policy be
> > > signed.
> >
> > To clarify, the policy being measured by this patch series is a
> > serialized representation of the in-memory policy data structures being
> > enforced by SELinux.  Not the file that was loaded.  Hence, this
> > measurement would detect tampering with the in-memory policy data
> > structures after the policy has been loaded.  In the case of SELinux,
> > one can read this serialized representation via /sys/fs/selinux/policy.
> > The result is not byte-for-byte identical to the policy file that was
> > loaded but can be semantically compared via sediff and other tools to
> > determine whether it is equivalent.
>
> Thank you for the clarification.   Could the policy hash be included
> with the other critical data?  Does it really need to be measured
> independently?

They were split into two separate functions because we wanted to be
able to support using different templates for them (ima-buf for the
state variables so that the measurement includes the original buffer,
which is small and relatively fixed-size, and ima-ng for the policy
because it is large and we just want to capture the hash for later
comparison against known-good).  Also, the state variables are
available for measurement always from early initialization, whereas
the policy is only available for measurement once we have loaded an
initial policy.

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