On Thu, 27 Jun 2019, Stephen Smalley wrote:

There are two scenarios where finer-grained distinctions make sense:

- Users may need to enable specific functionality that falls under the
umbrella of "confidentiality" or "integrity" lockdown.  Finer-grained lockdown
reasons free them from having to make an all-or-nothing choice between lost
functionality or no lockdown at all.

Agreed. This will be used for more than just UEFI secure boot on desktops, 
e.g. embedded systems using verified boot, where finer grained policy will 
be needed for what are sometimes very specific use-cases (which may be 
also covered by other mitigations).

This can be supported directly by the
lockdown module without any help from SELinux or other security modules; we
just need the ability to specify these finer-grained lockdown levels via the
boot parameters and securityfs nodes.

If the lockdown LSM implements fine grained policy (rather than the simple 
coarse grained policy), I'd suggest adding a new lockdown level of 
'custom' which by default enables all hooks but allows selective 
disablement via params/sysfs.

This would be simpler than telling users to use a different lockdown LSM 
for this.

- Different processes/programs may need to use different sets of functionality
restricted via lockdown confidentiality or integrity categories.  If we have
to allow all-or-none for the set of interfaces/functionality covered by the
generic confidentiality or integrity categories, then we'll end up having to
choose between lost functionality or overprivileged processes, neither of
which is optimal.

Is it truly the case that everything under the "confidentiality" category
poses the same level of risk to kernel confidentiality, and similarly for
everything under the "integrity" category?  If not, then being able to
distinguish them definitely has benefit.

Good question. We can't know the answer to this unless we know how an 
attacker might leverage access.

The value here IMHO is more in allowing tradeoffs to be made by system 
designers vs. disabling lockdown entirely.

I'm still not clear though on how/if this will compose with or be overridden
by other security modules.  We would need some means for another security
module to take over lockdown decisions once it has initialized (including
policy load), and to be able to access state that is currently private to the
lockdown module, like the level.

Why not utilize stacking (restrictively), similarly to capabilities?


-- 
James Morris
[off-list ref]