* Chris Mason (chris.mason@xxxxxxxxxx) wrote: > I'm sure people there will have a different versions of events. The > one part that was discussed was if pathname based security was > useful, and a number of the people in the room (outside of > novell) said it was. Now, it could be that nobody wanted to argue > anymore, since most opinions had come out on one list or another by > then. Indeed. The trouble is that's too high level compared with the actual implementation details. AA is stalled because it has failed to get VFS support for it's model. I don't see a nice way out unless it changes it's notion of policy language (globbing is the tough one) or gets traction to pass dentry/vfsmount all the way down. Paths are completely relevant for security, esp. when considering the parent dir and the leaf (as in forward lookup case). Retroactively creating the full path is at the minimum ugly, and in the worst case can be insecure (yes AA has taken many measures to mitigate that insecurity). > But as someone who doesn't use either SElinux or AA, I really hope > we can get past the part of the debate where: > > while(1) > AA) we think we're making users happy with pathname security > SELINUX) pathname security sucks Yes. Please. Both parties are miserably failing the sanity test. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. AA folks: deal with the VFS issues that your patchset have in a palatable way (which does not include passing NULL when it's inconvenient to do otherwise). You've already missed an opportunity with Christoph's suggestions for changes in NFS. I know you've considered many alternative approaches and consistently hit dead ends. But please note, if you have coded yourself into a corner because of your policy language, that's your issue to solve, not ours. SELinux folks: do something useful rather than quibbling over the TCSEC definition of MAC and AA's poor taste in marketing literature. Here's some suggestions: 1) Make SELinux usable (it's *still* the number one complaint). While this is a bit of a cheap shot, it really is one of the core reasons AA advocates exist. 2) Work on a variant of Kyle's suggestion to squash the relevancy of AA. 3) Write an effective exploit against AA that demonstrates the fundamental weakness of the model (better make sure it's not also an issue for targetted policy). thanks, -chris - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
