Re: [PATCH] per-process securebits

From: Ismail Dönmez
Date: Mon Feb 04 2008 - 20:17:46 EST


At Monday 04 February 2008 around 18:45:24 Serge E. Hallyn wrote:
> Quoting Andrew G. Morgan (morgan@xxxxxxxxxx):
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA1
> >
> > Ismail D??nmez wrote:
> > | What I meant to ask was what does "per-process securebits" brings as
> >
> > extra.
> >
> > It allows you to create a legacy free process tree. For example, a
> > chroot, or container (which Serge can obviously explain in more detail),
>
> (Just to give my thoughts on securebits and containers)
>
> A container is a set of processes which has its own private namespaces
> for all or most resources - for instance it sees only processes in its
> own pid namespace, and its first process, which is sees as pid 1, is
> known as some other pid, maybe 3459, to the rest of the system.
>
> We tend to talk about 'system containers' versus 'application
> containers'. A system container would be like a vserver or openvz
> instance, something which looks like a separate machine. I was
> going to say I don't imagine per-process securebits being useful
> there, but actually since a system container doesn't need to do any
> hardware setup it actually might be a much easier start for a full
> SECURE_NOROOT distro than a real machine. Heck, on a real machine init
> and a few legacy deamons could run in the init namespace, while users
> log in and apache etc run in a SECURE_NOROOT container.
>
> But I especially like the thought of for instance postfix running in a
> carefully crafted application container (with its own virtual network
> card and limited file tree and no visibility of other processes) with
> SECURE_NOROOT on.

This is really interesting security wise, will be nice to see how it can be
implemented in real life.

Thanks for the explanation and the implementation ;-)

Regards,
ismail

--
Never learn by your mistakes, if you do you may never dare to try again.
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