Re: [RFC] CIL and Source Policy Integration

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On 01/09/2014 11:15 AM, Stephen Smalley wrote:
> On 01/08/2014 03:44 PM, Steve Lawrence wrote:
>>
>> src-revert:
>>    Reverts changes made to master that conflict with the src-policy
>>    branch (e.g. how paths are handled, enabled/disable modules). Rather
>>    than dealing with a large amount of conflicts, it was easier to just
>>    remove the commits which add conflicting features, rebase the old
>>    source policy work on top of that, and add back any features that in
>>    manner consistent with source policy. This also reverts the preserve
>>    tunables patchset, but as I look at it while typing this, I realize
>>    that was unnecessary. Aside from numerous conflicts and the need to
>>    add CIL support, the only real issue is that the preserve tunables
>>    feature uses the -P flag, which source policy uses for priority. So I
>>    guess we'll have to pick a different letter.
> 
> Obviously we'll need that support as it is used.
> 

Agreed

>> integration:
>>    This branch builds CIL into libsepol, and updates libsepol,
>>    libsemanage, semodule, and semanage to work with and understand only
>>    CIL files.  Switching to CIL has a few side effects, such as removing
>>    base modules, versions, upgrades, adding configuration options to
>>    semanage.conf, etc. This also removes support for binary .pp modules.
> 
> So what's the transition plan for distributions with existing binary .pp
> modules, some of which will be locally generated by users?
> 

This is a tricky problem. A few ways I've thought (there's probably some
more, I'm all ears):

1) Add high level language support, treat .pp files as a higher level
language, and create a pp to cil converter. I think reversing .pp files
was looked at in the past (I forget who or where it ended up), though
I'm not sure how easy it would be translate a .pp to .cil. This would
probably be ideal and would minimize the transition pain, but the
difficulty of converting pp to cil is unknown to me.

2) Similar to 1, add high level language support, but have distributions
switch over to using source refpolicy, and have a te/if/fc to cil
converter. This would be nice in that distros could still work off of
the familiar refpolicy. The downsides are this doesn't solve the problem
of users with custom .pp modules, and as Jim has found out, converting
from source refpolicy to cil is not an easy process, and requires some
manual intervention. It's possible we could start massaging refpolicy
into something that is easier to automatically convert to cil, but I
don't know what would be needed.

3) Add a configuration option (semanage.conf?) which specifies which
format the module store is in (pp vs cil). Userspace always supports
both, but only one at a time. The downside of this is we have to
maintain two separate policy types. We could eventually deprecate .pp
support, but it might take a while before everyone switches over to cil
to the point where we could deprecate.

- Steve
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