On 11/16/2023 2:56 PM, Paul Moore wrote:
On Thu, Nov 16, 2023 at 5:41 PM Stefan Berger <stefanb@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 11/16/23 17:07, Paul Moore wrote:
On Tue, Nov 14, 2023 at 1:58 PM Stefan Berger <stefanb@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 11/14/23 13:36, Sush Shringarputale wrote:
On 11/13/2023 10:59 AM, Stefan Berger wrote:
On 10/19/23 14:49, Tushar Sugandhi wrote:
=======================================================================
| Introduction |
=======================================================================
This document provides a detailed overview of the proposed Kernel
feature IMA log snapshotting. It describes the motivation behind the
proposal, the problem to be solved, a detailed solution design with
examples, and describes the changes to be made in the clients/services
which are part of remote-attestation system. This is the 2nd version
of the proposal. The first version is present here[1].
Table of Contents:
------------------
A. Motivation and Background
B. Goals and Non-Goals
B.1 Goals
B.2 Non-Goals
C. Proposed Solution
C.1 Solution Summary
C.2 High-level Work-flow
D. Detailed Design
D.1 Snapshot Aggregate Event
D.2 Snapshot Triggering Mechanism
D.3 Choosing A Persistent Storage Location For Snapshots
D.4 Remote-Attestation Client/Service-side Changes
D.4.a Client-side Changes
D.4.b Service-side Changes
E. Example Walk-through
F. Other Design Considerations
G. References
Userspace applications will have to know
a) where are the shard files?
We describe the file storage location choices in section D.3, but user
applications will have to query the well-known location described there.
b) how do I read the shard files while locking out the producer of the
shard files?
IMO, this will require a well known config file and a locking method
(flock) so that user space applications can work together in this new
environment. The lock could be defined in the config file or just be
the config file itself.
The flock is a good idea for co-ordination between UM clients. While
the Kernel cannot enforce any access in this way, any UM process that
is planning on triggering the snapshot mechanism should follow that
protocol. We will ensure we document that as the best-practices in
the patch series.
It's more than 'best practices'. You need a well-known config file with
well-known config options in it.
All clients that were previously just trying to read new bytes from the
IMA log cannot do this anymore in the presence of a log shard producer
but have to also learn that a new log shard has been produced so they
need to figure out the new position in the log where to read from. So
maybe a counter in a config file should indicate to the log readers that
a new log has been produced -- otherwise they would have to monitor all
the log shard files or the log shard file's size.
If a counter is needed, I would suggest placing it somewhere other
than the config file so that we can enforce limited write access to
the config file.
Regardless, I imagine there are a few ways one could synchronize
various userspace applications such that they see a consistent view of
the decomposed log state, and the good news is that the approach
described here is opt-in from a userspace perspective. If the
A FUSE filesystem that stitches together the log shards from one or
multiple files + IMA log file(s) could make this approach transparent
for as long as log shards are not thrown away. Presumably it (or root)
could bind-mount its files over the two IMA log files.
userspace does not fully support IMA log snapshotting then it never
needs to trigger it and the system behaves as it does today; on the
I don't think individual applications should trigger it , instead some
dedicated background process running on a machine would do that every n
log entries or so and possibly offer the FUSE filesystem at the same
time. In either case, once any application triggers it, all either have
to know how to deal with the shards or FUSE would make it completely
transparent.
FUSE would be a reasonable user space co-ordination implementation. A
privileged process would trigger the snapshot generation and provide the
mountpoint to read the full IMA log backed by shards as needed by relying
parties.
Whether it is a privileged daemon or some other agent that triggers the
snapshot, it shouldn't impact the Kernel-side implementation.
- Sush
Yes, performing a snapshot is a privileged operation which I expect
would be done and managed by a dedicated daemon running on the system.
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