Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1750866AbWISS1h (ORCPT ); Tue, 19 Sep 2006 14:27:37 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1750850AbWISS1h (ORCPT ); Tue, 19 Sep 2006 14:27:37 -0400 Received: from gprs189-60.eurotel.cz ([160.218.189.60]:27576 "EHLO amd.ucw.cz") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1750834AbWISS1g (ORCPT ); Tue, 19 Sep 2006 14:27:36 -0400 Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2006 20:27:36 +0200 From: Pavel Machek To: Joshua Brindle Cc: casey@schaufler-ca.com, David Madore , Alan Cox , Linux Kernel mailing-list , LSM mailing-list Subject: Re: [PATCH 3/4] security: capabilities patch (version 0.4.4), part 3/4: introduce new capabilities Message-ID: <20060919182736.GF7099@elf.ucw.cz> References: <20060918160217.97076.qmail@web36601.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <450F38F7.6080006@gentoo.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <450F38F7.6080006@gentoo.org> X-Warning: Reading this can be dangerous to your mental health. User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.11+cvs20060126 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1456 Lines: 34 Hi! > >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. I do not know why this is unanalyzable... It seems very analyzable when reading the source code... and actually priviledge operations in source code mean that you can't get them wrong with wrong xattrs. Plus systems like qmail already use setuid() in source this way. Pavel -- (english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek (cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html - 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/