Re: [malware-list] scanner interface proposal was: [TALPA] Introto a linux interface for on access scanning

From: Eric Paris
Date: Mon Aug 18 2008 - 19:09:44 EST


On Tue, 2008-08-19 at 00:40 +0200, Pavel Machek wrote:
> Hi!
>
> > > On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 02:15:24PM +0100, tvrtko.ursulin@xxxxxxxxxx
> > wrote:
> > > > Then there is still a question of who allows some binary to declare
> > itself
> > > > exempt. If that decision was a mistake, or it gets compromised
> > security
> > > > will be off. A very powerful mechanism which must not be easily
> > > > accessible. With a good cache your worries go away even without a
> > scheme
> > > > like this.
> > >
> > > I have one word for you --- bittorrent. If you are downloading a very
> > > large torrent (say approximately a gigabyte), and it contains many
> > > pdf's that are say a few megabytes a piece, and things are coming in
> > > tribbles, having either a indexing scanner or an AV scanner wake up
> > > and rescan the file from scratch each time a tiny piece of the pdf
> > > comes in is going to eat your machine alive....
> >
> > Huh? I was never advocating re-scan after each modification and I even
> > explicitly said it does not make sense for AV not only for performance but
> > because it will be useless most of the time. I thought sending out
> > modified notification on close makes sense because it is a natural point,
> > unless someone is trying to subvert which is out of scope. Other
> > have
>
> Why do you think non-malicious applications won't write after close /
> keep file open forever?

If you ask this one more time without reading the many times I've
answered these questions I think I'm going to explode.

Permissions checks are done on open/read. Decisions are invalidated at
mtime update, which INCLUDES mmap after close! I don't care if you keep
your file open forever, if you wrote to it, we are just going to scan it
next time a process decided to open/read it. Please stop confusing this
already long and almost pointless thread with implementation details
that have repeatedly been explained.

-Eric

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