On 4/7/2020 2:31 PM, Nayna wrote:
On 4/6/20 6:14 PM, deven.desai@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
From: Deven Bowers <deven.desai@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Changelog:
------------------------------------
v1: Introduced
v2:
Split the second patch of the previous series into two.
Minor corrections in the cover-letter and documentation
comments regarding CAP_MAC_ADMIN checks in IPE.
Overview:
------------------------------------
IPE is a Linux Security Module, which allows for a configurable
policy to enforce integrity requirements on the whole system. It
attempts to solve the issue of Code Integrity: that any code being
executed (or files being read), are identical to the version that
was built by a trusted source.
Can you please clarify the "motivation" for this patch set more
clearly? It seems to define a policy layer on top of dm-verity, which
may be compiled into the kernel. In the motivation, can you please
also make it explicit why existing mechanisms cannot be extended to
achieve your purpose?
This LSM was born out of a motivation to provide strong integrity
guarantees without a dependency on file-metadata, allow the integrity
claims to be configurable on a hot system, and allow for the mechanisms
for ensuring integrity to be extendable.
This naturally had to be an LSM, as controlling execution at the block
or filesystem layer does not make sense. Existing LSM implementations
use filesystem metadata, and since one of IPE's goals is to secure file
metadata, it is circular to depend on the file metadata itself to make
decisions about whether the file has been modified.
Additionally, IPE while IPE currently provides dm-verity support and the
trust root support, it can be easily extended to other implementations
such as fs-verity. At it's core, IPE is attempting to separate mechanism
(dm-verity, fs-verity, etc.) from policy (IPE).
Also, AFIK, the changelog should be moved to the end of the patch
description.
Thanks! I'll move the changelog.
