Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1751938AbWISDqF (ORCPT ); Mon, 18 Sep 2006 23:46:05 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1751947AbWISDqF (ORCPT ); Mon, 18 Sep 2006 23:46:05 -0400 Received: from web36610.mail.mud.yahoo.com ([209.191.85.27]:56479 "HELO web36610.mail.mud.yahoo.com") by vger.kernel.org with SMTP id S1751945AbWISDqC (ORCPT ); Mon, 18 Sep 2006 23:46:02 -0400 Message-ID: <20060919034601.97733.qmail@web36610.mail.mud.yahoo.com> X-RocketYMMF: rancidfat Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 20:46:01 -0700 (PDT) From: Casey Schaufler Reply-To: casey@schaufler-ca.com Subject: Re: [PATCH 3/4] security: capabilities patch (version 0.4.4), part 3/4: introduce new capabilities To: Joshua Brindle Cc: David Madore , Linux Kernel mailing-list , LSM mailing-list In-Reply-To: <450F38F7.6080006@gentoo.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1403 Lines: 40 --- Joshua Brindle wrote: > > The first system I took through evaluation > > (that is, independent 3rd party analysis) stored > > security attributes in a file while the second > > and third systems attached the attributes > > directly (XFS). The 1st evaluation required > > 5 years, the 2nd 1 year. It is possible that > > I just got a lot smarter with age, but I > > ascribe a significant amount of the improvement > > to the direct association of the attributes > > to the file. > Thats great but entirely irrelevant in this context. > The patch and caps > in question are not attached to the file via some > externally observable > property (eg., xattr) but instead are embedded in > the source code so > that it can drop caps at certain points during the > execution or before > executing another app, thus unanalyzable. Oh that. Sure, we used capability bracketing in the code, too. That makes it easy to determine when a capability is active. What, you don't think that it's possible to analyze source code? Of course it is. Refer to the evaluation reports if you don't believe me. Casey Schaufler casey@schaufler-ca.com - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/