On 03/28/2014 09:12 AM, Daniel Micay wrote:
...
Security needs to be simple, predictable and well understood. It needs
to be provably correct and easily audited. SELinux is none of these
things. I don't really understand why a distribution striving for
simplicity would ever enable it.
I think the above is a tad misleading.
While we don't yet have user space tools - which was I believe a key, if
not critical, point Thomas was making - selinux is very useful and adds
a strong security layer. The kernel code is well audited and well
tested in real world too. Just not by us Arch folks - at least today -
without the user space and policy support in core.
I cannot speak for AppArmor, but I do recall when the big debate to
include it in mainline or not was going on, that Linus was a big
proponent of using both together. Hence, today both are there.
And, it's not only for servers but for laptops as well. In fact newer
versions of Android phones/tablets use selinux enabled in enforcing
mode. So with the right user space policies (redhat has some good base
configs here) selinux could be a strong add for Arch linux in the future
- maybe.
The discussion here, I thought, was whether having it in the stock Arch
kernel offers any value to the community today. As Thomas said - it's
pretty easy to build a custom kernel via abs if you want to work on user
space policy etc.
I would actually like to see Arch have selinux support - it would make
us stronger - but we just don't have the tools and policies today.
gene
