Re: [PATCH] capabilites, take 2

[Andy Lutomirski]

Stephen Smalley wrote:

> On Fri, 2004-05-14 at 08:03, Albert Cahalan wrote:
>
> > This would be an excellent time to reconsider how capabilities
> > are assigned to bits. You're breaking things anyway; you might
> > as well do all the breaking at once. I want local-use bits so
> > that the print queue management access isn't by magic UID/GID.
> > We haven't escaped UID-as-priv if server apps and setuid apps
> > are still making UID-based access control decisions.
>
>
> Capabilities are a broken model for privilege management; try RBAC/TE
> instead.  http://www.securecomputing.com/pdf/secureos.pdf has notes
> about the history and comparison of capabilities vs. TE.
>
> Instead of adding new capability bits, replace capable() calls with LSM
> hook calls that offer you finer granularity both in operation and in
> object-based decisions, and then use a security module like SELinux to
> map that to actual permission checks.  SELinux provides a framework for
> defining security classes and permissions, including both definitions
> used by the kernel and definitions used by userspace policy enforcers
> (ala security-enhanced X).

Thanks -- turning brain back on, SELinux is obviously better than any
fine-grained capability scheme I can imagine.

So unless anyone convinces me you're wrong, I'll stick with just
fixing up capabilities to work without making them finer-grained.

--Andy
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/