Re: Out of tree module using LSM

[Jon Masters]

On Thu, 2007-11-29 at 10:40 -0800, Ray Lee wrote:
> On Nov 29, 2007 9:36 AM, Alan Cox <alan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > closed. But more importantly further access to it can be blocked until
> > > appropriate actions are taken which also applies with your example, no? Is
> >
> > That bit is hard- very hard.
> 
> In some sense it seems like the same problem faced by dynamic
> translators such as Qemu. They really want to vet a dirtied or faulted
> page before allowing the app to run unhindered. It's be nice to have
> some way to do that without virtualizing the whole of userspace.

Like I hinted at, you can't just "vet a page". Because a page alone is
meaningless garbage, unless it happens to be an extremely small program,
with headers, all nicely aligned. Most likely you don't know if a random
page of data is code from a COFF file, ELF file, or some random crap I
typed in at a terminal after having too much coffee.

So. You'd need to scan *all the pages* of *the entire file*, every time
that you performed any type of operation. Hence, that idea is completely
out right away. The on-access scanning isn't perfect, but it's probably
about as good as you can get and still have a reasonably usable system.

Jon.


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