The secmark "one user" policy
From: casey@schaufler-ca.com (Casey Schaufler)
Date: 2017-06-21 23:45:29
On 6/21/2017 4:07 PM, John Johansen wrote:
On 06/21/2017 08:23 AM, Casey Schaufler wrote:quoted
On 6/21/2017 12:13 AM, James Morris wrote:quoted
On Tue, 20 Jun 2017, Casey Schaufler wrote:quoted
I'm looking at the secmark code and am looking in particular at the places where it explicitly says that it is intended for one security module at a time. For extreme stacking I can either enforce this restriction by configuration or remove it by clever uses of secid mappings. Either can be made "transparent" to existing user-space. Paul has expressed distaste for using configuration as a shortcut for dealing with this kind of problem, and I generally agree with him. On the other hand, the code is quite clear that it is designed for one and only one kind of secid at a time. I don't want to put a lot of effort into patches that are unacceptable to the author.How would you see this working, ideally?Ideally there would be a separate secmark for each security module that wants to use the mechanism. Mechanism would be provided* so that user-space can identify which security module it is referring to when interacting with the kernel. My understanding is that we're unlikely to get an expanded secmark, so I have concentrated elsewhere. A "clever" secid mapping takes the secids from all the security modules and gently manipulates them until they fit into a single u32. This might be an index into a list of secid sets, but if you have two modules using secids you can give each half of the secmark and accommodate many configurations, including Fedora. Again, you need mechanism* for user-space. This option would require changes to the xt_SECMARK implementation, which goes out of it's way to ensure all secmarks come from the same security module. One option is to add a SECMARK_MODE_COMPOUND, but that isn't any more helpful then removing the restriction. As for configuration options, SELinux only uses secmarks when user-space introduces them. If netfilter doesn't have any security rules that add secmarks, none are used. Smack can be configured to set secmarks on all packets, with the potential for change by user-space, but can also be set up without any use of secmarks. There doesn't need to be any significant change to xt_SECMARK if it is important to maintain the "one user" model. Requiring that the user-space use of netfilter be sane for the multiple security module case (e.g. don't use SELinux firewall if Smack has the secmark) seems somewhat reasonable. I can work with any of these three solutions. Multiple secmarks would be ideal, but I understand is a lost cause. Clever secids add overhead and complexity. Restricting configuration options is unsavory, but I don't think unreasonably so.I too would prefer multiple secmarks, but doing some sort of mapping seems like what we will be stuck with. For a first pass I think the restricted configurations options is reasonable, but I think it will become a problem as people start trying to actually use LSM stacking. I think for now sticking with restricted configurations and dealing with mappings when it becomes an actual issue and we have better use cases is not an unreasonable approach.
It boils down to how many security modules are going to implement network controls that require passing information with the packet. I can easily see a bunch of use cases beyond what SELinux and Smack do, but I can't say that I'd see those used in conjunction with the "old school" security modules. We can have a lousy mapping scheme if we don't expect it to be used except in unnatural cases. Is AppArmor going to be using secmarks? I haven't looked at what's going into 4.13 yet. If you are, are they required or optional, or used when netfilter assigns them?
quoted
--- * There's already need to identity which security module you're dealing with at a given time for SO_PEERSEC and /proc/.../attr/current. In the past I've suggested decorating attribute values with the name of the module (smack='System') but I'm currently leaning more toward a prctl() to set the value if you don't want to get whatever comes first. That should maximize the effectiveness of existing user-space tools.
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