Re: [PATCH v2 1/2] selinux: add tracepoint on denials

[Stephen Smalley]

On 8/13/20 10:48 AM, Thiébaud Weksteen wrote:

> The audit data currently captures which process and which target
> is responsible for a denial. There is no data on where exactly in the
> process that call occurred. Debugging can be made easier by being able to
> reconstruct the unified kernel and userland stack traces [1]. Add a
> tracepoint on the SELinux denials which can then be used by userland
> (i.e. perf).
>
> Although this patch could manually be added by each OS developer to
> trouble shoot a denial, adding it to the kernel streamlines the
> developers workflow.
>
> It is possible to use perf for monitoring the event:
>    # perf record -e avc:selinux_audited -g -a
>    ^C
>    # perf report -g
>    [...]
>        6.40%     6.40%  audited=800000 tclass=4
>                 |
>                    __libc_start_main
>                    |
>                    |--4.60%--__GI___ioctl
>                    |          entry_SYSCALL_64
>                    |          do_syscall_64
>                    |          __x64_sys_ioctl
>                    |          ksys_ioctl
>                    |          binder_ioctl
>                    |          binder_set_nice
>                    |          can_nice
>                    |          capable
>                    |          security_capable
>                    |          cred_has_capability.isra.0
>                    |          slow_avc_audit
>                    |          common_lsm_audit
>                    |          avc_audit_post_callback
>                    |          avc_audit_post_callback
>                    |
>
> It is also possible to use the ftrace interface:
>    # echo 1 > /sys/kernel/debug/tracing/events/avc/selinux_audited/enable
>    # cat /sys/kernel/debug/tracing/trace
>    tracer: nop
>    entries-in-buffer/entries-written: 1/1   #P:8
>    [...]
>    dmesg-3624  [001] 13072.325358: selinux_denied: audited=800000 tclass=4

An explanation here of how one might go about decoding audited and 
tclass would be helpful to users (even better would be a script to do it 
for them).  Again, I know how to do that but not everyone using 
perf/ftrace will.