2008-06-03 13:34:51

by Stephen Smalley

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Re: [patch 6/8] Factor out sysctl pathname code


On Sat, 2008-05-31 at 04:27 -0400, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 01:32:51PM +0200, Miklos Szeredi wrote:
> > Convert the selinux sysctl pathname computation code into a standalone
> > function.
>
> No point bloating core kernel for selinux mess. And this whole routine
> should rather go away rather than moving it to core code. While doing
> pathname based lookup for the label might work for the limited case
> of sysctl where there are no symlinks but is a rather dumb idea in
> general. And reconstructing this path from the sysctl tables is twice
> as dumb.

I didn't see an alternative for fine-grained labeling of sysctl - the
pathname was the only stable key I could use as an index into policy;
xattrs or the like didn't make sense there. And generating the pathname
from the sysctl tables ensured that we obtained a stable result that
wasn't mutable by userspace. Do you have an alternative suggestion?

--
Stephen Smalley
National Security Agency