Re: [PATCH 0/6] MODSIGN: Kernel module signing

On Thu, 15 Feb 2007, Roman Zippel wrote:

On Thu, 15 Feb 2007, David Howells wrote:

quoted

It is possible to protect /dev/mem and /dev/kmem or make them unavailable and
it is possible to protect the kernel's memory whilst it is running (provided
you don't have nommu or broken hardware and you don't let userspace concoct any
DMA request it likes) which mostly closes those other vectors I mentioned.
This isn't something I intended to look at with this patch.  Those are separate
holes.

Exactly and as long as there are these holes, these patches are only
kernel bloat. The simple verification can also be done in userspace and
module signing offers no real security.
What real value do these patches provide, that can't be reached via other
means? Who else than distributions would be interested in this? Pretty
much any use you initially mentioned can be done in simpler ways, e.g.
anyone afraid of modules simply disables module loading completely.

this issue, and these holes keep comeing up in discussions, why can't these 
holes be closed? I seem to remember seeing patches that would remove /dev/kmem 
being sent to the list, but they weren't accepted into the kernel (and I seem to 
remember people being against the concept of removeing them, not against 
techincal details of the patches. but this was many years ago)

at one point I remember hearing that X required raw /dev/kmem, but for servers 
you don't need/want X anyway, so this is a useful option even if X doesn't get 
fixed.

David Lang