Historically the NetLabel LSM secattr catmap functions and data
structures have had very long names which makes a mess of the NetLabel
code and anyone who uses NetLabel. This patch renames the catmap
functions and structures from "*_secattr_catmap_*" to just "*_catmap_*"
which improves things greatly.
There are no substantial code or logic changes in this patch.
Signed-off-by: Paul Moore <pmoore@redhat.com>
Tested-by: Casey Schaufler <casey@schaufler-ca.com>
The NetLabel secattr catmap functions, and the SELinux import/export
glue routines, were broken in many horrible ways and the SELinux glue
code fiddled with the NetLabel catmap structures in ways that we
probably shouldn't allow. At some point this "worked", but that was
likely due to a bit of dumb luck and sub-par testing (both inflicted
by yours truly). This patch corrects these problems by basically
gutting the code in favor of something less obtuse and restoring the
NetLabel abstractions in the SELinux catmap glue code.
Everything is working now, and if it decides to break itself in the
future this code will be much easier to debug than the code it
replaces.
One noteworthy side effect of the changes is that it is no longer
necessary to allocate a NetLabel catmap before calling one of the
NetLabel APIs to set a bit in the catmap. NetLabel will automatically
allocate the catmap nodes when needed, resulting in less allocations
when the lowest bit is greater than 255 and less code in the LSMs.
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
Reported-by: Christian Evans <frodox@zoho.com>
Signed-off-by: Paul Moore <pmoore@redhat.com>
Tested-by: Casey Schaufler <casey@schaufler-ca.com>
The NetLabel category (catmap) functions have a problem in that they
assume categories will be set in an increasing manner, e.g. the next
category set will always be larger than the last. Unfortunately, this
is not a valid assumption and could result in problems when attempting
to set categories less than the startbit in the lowest catmap node.
In some cases kernel panics and other nasties can result.
This patch corrects the problem by checking for this and allocating a
new catmap node instance and placing it at the front of the list.
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
Reported-by: Christian Evans <frodox@zoho.com>
Signed-off-by: Paul Moore <pmoore@redhat.com>
Tested-by: Casey Schaufler <casey@schaufler-ca.com>
This allows to limit ptrace beyond the regular smack access rules.
It adds a smackfs/ptrace interface that allows smack to be configured
to require equal smack labels for PTRACE_MODE_ATTACH access.
See the changes in Documentation/security/Smack.txt below for details.
Signed-off-by: Lukasz Pawelczyk <l.pawelczyk@partner.samsung.com>
Signed-off-by: Rafal Krypa <r.krypa@samsung.com>
The order of subject/object is currently reversed in
smack_ptrace_traceme(). It is currently checked if the tracee has a
capability to trace tracer and according to this rule a decision is made
whether the tracer will be allowed to trace tracee.
Signed-off-by: Lukasz Pawelczyk <l.pawelczyk@partner.samsung.com>
Signed-off-by: Rafal Krypa <r.krypa@samsung.com>
Linux file locking does not follow the same rules
as other mechanisms. Even though it is a write operation
a process can set a read lock on files which it has open
only for read access. Two programs with read access to
a file can use read locks to communicate.
This is not acceptable in a Mandatory Access Control
environment. Smack treats setting a read lock as the
write operation that it is. Unfortunately, many programs
assume that setting a read lock is a read operation.
These programs are unhappy in the Smack environment.
This patch introduces a new access mode (lock) to address
this problem. A process with lock access to a file can
set a read lock. A process with write access to a file can
set a read lock or a write lock. This prevents a situation
where processes are granted write access just so they can
set read locks.
Targeted for git://git.gitorious.org/smack-next/kernel.git
Signed-off-by: Casey Schaufler <casey@schaufler-ca.com>
Accepted for the smack-next tree after changing the number of
slots from 128 to 16.
This patch adds a hash table to quicken searching of a smack label by its name.
Basically, the patch improves performance of SMACK initialization. Parsing of
rules involves translation from a string to a smack_known (aka label) entity
which is done in smk_find_entry().
The current implementation of the function iterates over a global list of
smack_known resulting in O(N) complexity for smk_find_entry(). The total
complexity of SMACK initialization becomes O(rules * labels). Therefore it
scales quadratically with a complexity of a system.
Applying the patch reduced the complexity of smk_find_entry() to O(1) as long
as number of label is in hundreds. If the number of labels is increased please
update SMACK_HASH_SLOTS constant defined in security/smack/smack.h. Introducing
the configuration of this constant with Kconfig or cmdline might be a good
idea.
The size of the hash table was adjusted experimentally. The rule set used by
TIZEN contains circa 17K rules for 500 labels. The table above contains
results of SMACK initialization using 'time smackctl apply' bash command.
The 'Ref' is a kernel without this patch applied. The consecutive values
refers to value of SMACK_HASH_SLOTS. Every measurement was repeated three
times to reduce noise.
| Ref | 1 | 2 | 4 | 8 | 16 | 32 | 64 | 128 | 256 | 512
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Run1 | 1.156 | 1.096 | 0.883 | 0.764 | 0.692 | 0.667 | 0.649 | 0.633 | 0.634 | 0.629 | 0.620
Run2 | 1.156 | 1.111 | 0.885 | 0.764 | 0.694 | 0.661 | 0.649 | 0.651 | 0.634 | 0.638 | 0.623
Run3 | 1.160 | 1.107 | 0.886 | 0.764 | 0.694 | 0.671 | 0.661 | 0.638 | 0.631 | 0.624 | 0.638
AVG | 1.157 | 1.105 | 0.885 | 0.764 | 0.693 | 0.666 | 0.653 | 0.641 | 0.633 | 0.630 | 0.627
Surprisingly, a single hlist is slightly faster than a double-linked list.
The speed-up saturates near 64 slots. Therefore I chose value 128 to provide
some margin if more labels were used.
It looks that IO becomes a new bottleneck.
Signed-off-by: Tomasz Stanislawski <t.stanislaws@samsung.com>
Each Smack label that the kernel has seen is added to a
list of labels. The list of access rules for a given subject
label hangs off of the label list entry for the label.
This patch changes the structures that contain subject
labels to point at the label list entry rather that the
label itself. Doing so removes a label list lookup in
smk_access() that was accounting for the largest single
chunk of Smack overhead.
Targeted for git://git.gitorious.org/smack-next/kernel.git
Signed-off-by: Casey Schaufler <casey@schaufler-ca.com>
This fixes audit logs for granting or denial of permissions to show
information about transmute bit.
Targeted for git://git.gitorious.org/smack-next/kernel.git
Signed-off-by: Rafal Krypa <r.krypa@samsung.com>
Smack is integrated with the POSIX capabilities scheme,
using the capabilities CAP_MAC_OVERRIDE and CAP_MAC_ADMIN to
determine if a process is allowed to ignore Smack checks or
change Smack related data respectively. Smack provides an
additional restriction that if an onlycap value is set
by writing to /smack/onlycap only tasks with that Smack
label are allowed to use CAP_MAC_OVERRIDE.
This change adds CAP_MAC_ADMIN as a capability that is affected
by the onlycap mechanism.
Targeted for git://git.gitorious.org/smack-next/kernel.git
Signed-off-by: Casey Schaufler <casey@schaufler-ca.com>
V4 updated to current linux-security#next
Targeted for git://gitorious.org/smack-next/kernel.git
Modern application runtime environments like to use
naming schemes that are structured and generated without
human intervention. Even though the Smack limit of 23
characters for a label name is perfectly rational for
human use there have been complaints that the limit is
a problem in environments where names are composed from
a set or sources, including vendor, author, distribution
channel and application name. Names like
softwarehouse-pgwodehouse-coolappstore-mellowmuskrats
are becoming harder to avoid. This patch introduces long
label support in Smack. Labels are now limited to 255
characters instead of the old 23.
The primary reason for limiting the labels to 23 characters
was so they could be directly contained in CIPSO category sets.
This is still done were possible, but for labels that are too
large a mapping is required. This is perfectly safe for communication
that stays "on the box" and doesn't require much coordination
between boxes beyond what would have been required to keep label
names consistent.
The bulk of this patch is in smackfs, adding and updating
administrative interfaces. Because existing APIs can't be
changed new ones that do much the same things as old ones
have been introduced.
The Smack specific CIPSO data representation has been removed
and replaced with the data format used by netlabel. The CIPSO
header is now computed when a label is imported rather than
on use. This results in improved IP performance. The smack
label is now allocated separately from the containing structure,
allowing for larger strings.
Four new /smack interfaces have been introduced as four
of the old interfaces strictly required labels be specified
in fixed length arrays.
The access interface is supplemented with the check interface:
access "Subject Object rwxat"
access2 "Subject Object rwaxt"
The load interface is supplemented with the rules interface:
load "Subject Object rwxat"
load2 "Subject Object rwaxt"
The load-self interface is supplemented with the self-rules interface:
load-self "Subject Object rwxat"
load-self2 "Subject Object rwaxt"
The cipso interface is supplemented with the wire interface:
cipso "Subject lvl cnt c1 c2 ..."
cipso2 "Subject lvl cnt c1 c2 ..."
The old interfaces are maintained for compatibility.
Signed-off-by: Casey Schaufler <casey@schaufler-ca.com>
It just bloats the audit data structure for no good reason, since the
only time those fields are filled are just before calling the
common_lsm_audit() function, which is also the only user of those
fields.
So just make them be the arguments to common_lsm_audit(), rather than
bloating that structure that is passed around everywhere, and is
initialized in hot paths.
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Linus found that the gigantic size of the common audit data caused a big
perf hit on something as simple as running stat() in a loop. This patch
requires LSMs to declare the LSM specific portion separately rather than
doing it in a union. Thus each LSM can be responsible for shrinking their
portion and don't have to pay a penalty just because other LSMs have a
bigger space requirement.
Signed-off-by: Eric Paris <eparis@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Allow query access as a normal user removing the need
for CAP_MAC_ADMIN. Give RW access to /smack/access
for UGO. Do not import smack labels in access check.
Signed-off-by: Jarkko Sakkinen <jarkko.j.sakkinen@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Casey Schaufler <cschaufler@cschaufler-intel.(none)>
This patch is targeted for the smack-next tree.
Smack access checks suffer from two significant performance
issues. In cases where there are large numbers of rules the
search of the single list of rules is wasteful. Comparing the
string values of the smack labels is less efficient than a
numeric comparison would.
These changes take advantage of the Smack label list, which
maintains the mapping of Smack labels to secids and optional
CIPSO labels. Because the labels are kept perpetually, an
access check can be done strictly based on the address of the
label in the list without ever looking at the label itself.
Rather than keeping one global list of rules the rules with
a particular subject label can be based off of that label
list entry. The access check need never look at entries that
do not use the current subject label.
This requires that packets coming off the network with
CIPSO direct Smack labels that have never been seen before
be treated carefully. The only case where they could be
delivered is where the receiving socket has an IPIN star
label, so that case is explicitly addressed.
On a system with 39,800 rules (200 labels in all permutations)
a system with this patch runs an access speed test in 5% of
the time of the old version. That should be a best case
improvement. If all of the rules are associated with the
same subject label and all of the accesses are for processes
with that label (unlikely) the improvement is about 30%.
Signed-off-by: Casey Schaufler <casey@schaufler-ca.com>
In the embedded world there are often situations
where libraries are updated from a variety of sources,
for a variety of reasons, and with any number of
security characteristics. These differences
might include privilege required for a given library
provided interface to function properly, as occurs
from time to time in graphics libraries. There are
also cases where it is important to limit use of
libraries based on the provider of the library and
the security aware application may make choices
based on that criteria.
These issues are addressed by providing an additional
Smack label that may optionally be assigned to an object,
the SMACK64MMAP attribute. An mmap operation is allowed
if there is no such attribute.
If there is a SMACK64MMAP attribute the mmap is permitted
only if a subject with that label has all of the access
permitted a subject with the current task label.
Security aware applications may from time to time
wish to reduce their "privilege" to avoid accidental use
of privilege. One case where this arises is the
environment in which multiple sources provide libraries
to perform the same functions. An application may know
that it should eschew services made available from a
particular vendor, or of a particular version.
In support of this a secondary list of Smack rules has
been added that is local to the task. This list is
consulted only in the case where the global list has
approved access. It can only further restrict access.
Unlike the global last, if no entry is found on the
local list access is granted. An application can add
entries to its own list by writing to /smack/load-self.
The changes appear large as they involve refactoring
the list handling to accomodate there being more
than one rule list.
Signed-off-by: Casey Schaufler <casey@schaufler-ca.com>
In a situation where Smack access rules allow processes
with multiple labels to write to a directory it is easy
to get into a situation where the directory gets cluttered
with files that the owner can't deal with because while
they could be written to the directory a process at the
label of the directory can't write them. This is generally
the desired behavior, but when it isn't it is a real
issue.
This patch introduces a new attribute SMACK64TRANSMUTE that
instructs Smack to create the file with the label of the directory
under certain circumstances.
A new access mode, "t" for transmute, is made available to
Smack access rules, which are expanded from "rwxa" to "rwxat".
If a file is created in a directory marked as transmutable
and if access was granted to perform the operation by a rule
that included the transmute mode, then the file gets the
Smack label of the directory instead of the Smack label of the
creating process.
Note that this is equivalent to creating an empty file at the
label of the directory and then having the other process write
to it. The transmute scheme requires that both the access rule
allows transmutation and that the directory be explicitly marked.
Signed-off-by: Jarkko Sakkinen <ext-jarkko.2.sakkinen@nokia.com>
Signed-off-by: Casey Schaufler <casey@schaufler-ca.com>
SMACK64EXEC. It defines label that is used while task is
running.
Exception: in smack_task_wait() child task is checked
for write access to parent task using label inherited
from the task that forked it.
Fixed issues from previous submit:
- SMACK64EXEC was not read when SMACK64 was not set.
- inode security blob was not updated after setting
SMACK64EXEC
- inode security blob was not updated when removing
SMACK64EXEC
percpu.h is included by sched.h and module.h and thus ends up being
included when building most .c files. percpu.h includes slab.h which
in turn includes gfp.h making everything defined by the two files
universally available and complicating inclusion dependencies.
percpu.h -> slab.h dependency is about to be removed. Prepare for
this change by updating users of gfp and slab facilities include those
headers directly instead of assuming availability. As this conversion
needs to touch large number of source files, the following script is
used as the basis of conversion.
http://userweb.kernel.org/~tj/misc/slabh-sweep.py
The script does the followings.
* Scan files for gfp and slab usages and update includes such that
only the necessary includes are there. ie. if only gfp is used,
gfp.h, if slab is used, slab.h.
* When the script inserts a new include, it looks at the include
blocks and try to put the new include such that its order conforms
to its surrounding. It's put in the include block which contains
core kernel includes, in the same order that the rest are ordered -
alphabetical, Christmas tree, rev-Xmas-tree or at the end if there
doesn't seem to be any matching order.
* If the script can't find a place to put a new include (mostly
because the file doesn't have fitting include block), it prints out
an error message indicating which .h file needs to be added to the
file.
The conversion was done in the following steps.
1. The initial automatic conversion of all .c files updated slightly
over 4000 files, deleting around 700 includes and adding ~480 gfp.h
and ~3000 slab.h inclusions. The script emitted errors for ~400
files.
2. Each error was manually checked. Some didn't need the inclusion,
some needed manual addition while adding it to implementation .h or
embedding .c file was more appropriate for others. This step added
inclusions to around 150 files.
3. The script was run again and the output was compared to the edits
from #2 to make sure no file was left behind.
4. Several build tests were done and a couple of problems were fixed.
e.g. lib/decompress_*.c used malloc/free() wrappers around slab
APIs requiring slab.h to be added manually.
5. The script was run on all .h files but without automatically
editing them as sprinkling gfp.h and slab.h inclusions around .h
files could easily lead to inclusion dependency hell. Most gfp.h
inclusion directives were ignored as stuff from gfp.h was usually
wildly available and often used in preprocessor macros. Each
slab.h inclusion directive was examined and added manually as
necessary.
6. percpu.h was updated not to include slab.h.
7. Build test were done on the following configurations and failures
were fixed. CONFIG_GCOV_KERNEL was turned off for all tests (as my
distributed build env didn't work with gcov compiles) and a few
more options had to be turned off depending on archs to make things
build (like ipr on powerpc/64 which failed due to missing writeq).
* x86 and x86_64 UP and SMP allmodconfig and a custom test config.
* powerpc and powerpc64 SMP allmodconfig
* sparc and sparc64 SMP allmodconfig
* ia64 SMP allmodconfig
* s390 SMP allmodconfig
* alpha SMP allmodconfig
* um on x86_64 SMP allmodconfig
8. percpu.h modifications were reverted so that it could be applied as
a separate patch and serve as bisection point.
Given the fact that I had only a couple of failures from tests on step
6, I'm fairly confident about the coverage of this conversion patch.
If there is a breakage, it's likely to be something in one of the arch
headers which should be easily discoverable easily on most builds of
the specific arch.
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Guess-its-ok-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@redhat.com>
Cc: Lee Schermerhorn <Lee.Schermerhorn@hp.com>
Made the lsm_priv union in include/linux/lsm_audit.h
anonymous.
Signed-off-by: Thomas Liu <tliu@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Eric Paris <eparis@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
Moved variable function in include/linux/lsm_audit.h into the
smack_audit_data struct since it is never used outside of it.
Also removed setting of function in the COMMON_AUDIT_DATA_INIT
macro because that variable is now private to SMACK.
Signed-off-by: Thomas Liu <tliu@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Eric Paris <eparis@redhat.com>
I-dont-see-any-problems-with-it: Casey Schaufler <casey@schaufler-ca.com>
Signed-off-by: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
the following patch, add logging of Smack security decisions.
This is of course very useful to understand what your current smack policy does.
As suggested by Casey, it also now forbids labels with ', " or \
It introduces a '/smack/logging' switch :
0: no logging
1: log denied (default)
2: log accepted
3: log denied&accepted
Signed-off-by: Etienne Basset <etienne.basset@numericable.fr>
Acked-by: Casey Schaufler <casey@schaufler-ca.com>
Acked-by: Eric Paris <eparis@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
This patch adds a new special option '-CIPSO' to the Smack subsystem. When used
in the netlabel list, it means "use CIPSO networking". A use case is when your
local network speaks CIPSO and you want also to connect to the unlabeled
Internet. This patch also add some documentation describing that. The patch
also corrects an oops when setting a '' SMACK64 xattr to a file.
Signed-off-by: Etienne Basset <etienne.basset@numericable.fr>
Signed-off-by: Paul Moore <paul.moore@hp.com>
Acked-by: Casey Schaufler <casey@schaufler-ca.com>
Signed-off-by: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
the following patch (on top of 2.6.29) converts Smack lists to standard linux lists
Please review and consider for inclusion in 2.6.30-rc
regards,
Etienne
Signed-off-by: Etienne Basset <etienne.basset@numericable.fr>
Acked-by: Casey Schaufler <casey@schaufler-ca.com>
Fix/add kernel-doc notation and fix typos in security/smack/.
Signed-off-by: Randy Dunlap <randy.dunlap@oracle.com>
Acked-by: Casey Schaufler <casey@schaufler-ca.com>
Signed-off-by: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
Add support for unlabeled network hosts and networks.
Relies heavily on Paul Moore's netlabel support.
Creates a new entry in /smack called netlabel. Writes to /smack/netlabel
take the form:
A.B.C.D LABEL
or
A.B.C.D/N LABEL
where A.B.C.D is a network address, N is an integer between 0-32,
and LABEL is the Smack label to be used. If /N is omitted /32 is
assumed. N designates the netmask for the address. Entries are
matched by the most specific address/mask pair. 0.0.0.0/0 will
match everything, while 192.168.1.117/32 will match exactly one
host.
A new system label "@", pronounced "web", is defined. Processes
can not be assigned the web label. An address assigned the web
label can be written to by any process, and packets coming from
a web address can be written to any socket. Use of the web label
is a violation of any strict MAC policy, but the web label has
been requested many times.
The nltype entry has been removed from /smack. It did not work right
and the netlabel interface can be used to specify that all hosts
be treated as unlabeled.
CIPSO labels on incoming packets will be honored, even from designated
single label hosts. Single label hosts can only be written to by
processes with labels that can write to the label of the host.
Packets sent to single label hosts will always be unlabeled.
Once added a single label designation cannot be removed, however
the label may be changed.
The behavior of the ambient label remains unchanged.
Signed-off-by: Casey Schaufler <casey@schaufler-ca.com>
Signed-off-by: Paul Moore <paul.moore@hp.com>
Wrap current->cred and a few other accessors to hide their actual
implementation.
Signed-off-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Acked-by: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
Acked-by: Serge Hallyn <serue@us.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
Separate the task security context from task_struct. At this point, the
security data is temporarily embedded in the task_struct with two pointers
pointing to it.
Note that the Alpha arch is altered as it refers to (E)UID and (E)GID in
entry.S via asm-offsets.
With comment fixes Signed-off-by: Marc Dionne <marc.c.dionne@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Acked-by: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
Acked-by: Serge Hallyn <serue@us.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
There have been a number of requests to make the Smack LSM
enforce MAC even in the face of privilege, either capability
based or superuser based. This is not universally desired,
however, so it seems desirable to make it optional. Further,
at least one legacy OS implemented a scheme whereby only
processes running with one particular label could be exempt
from MAC. This patch supports these three cases.
If /smack/onlycap is empty (unset or null-string) privilege
is enforced in the normal way.
If /smack/onlycap contains a label only processes running with
that label may be MAC exempt.
If the label in /smack/onlycap is the star label ("*") the
semantics of the star label combine with the privilege
restrictions to prevent any violations of MAC, even in the
presence of privilege.
Again, this will be independent of the privilege scheme.
Signed-off-by: Casey Schaufler <casey@schaufler-ca.com>
Reviewed-by: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
Smack is the Simplified Mandatory Access Control Kernel.
Smack implements mandatory access control (MAC) using labels
attached to tasks and data containers, including files, SVIPC,
and other tasks. Smack is a kernel based scheme that requires
an absolute minimum of application support and a very small
amount of configuration data.
Smack uses extended attributes and
provides a set of general mount options, borrowing technics used
elsewhere. Smack uses netlabel for CIPSO labeling. Smack provides
a pseudo-filesystem smackfs that is used for manipulation of
system Smack attributes.
The patch, patches for ls and sshd, a README, a startup script,
and x86 binaries for ls and sshd are also available on
http://www.schaufler-ca.com
Development has been done using Fedora Core 7 in a virtual machine
environment and on an old Sony laptop.
Smack provides mandatory access controls based on the label attached
to a task and the label attached to the object it is attempting to
access. Smack labels are deliberately short (1-23 characters) text
strings. Single character labels using special characters are reserved
for system use. The only operation applied to Smack labels is equality
comparison. No wildcards or expressions, regular or otherwise, are
used. Smack labels are composed of printable characters and may not
include "/".
A file always gets the Smack label of the task that created it.
Smack defines and uses these labels:
"*" - pronounced "star"
"_" - pronounced "floor"
"^" - pronounced "hat"
"?" - pronounced "huh"
The access rules enforced by Smack are, in order:
1. Any access requested by a task labeled "*" is denied.
2. A read or execute access requested by a task labeled "^"
is permitted.
3. A read or execute access requested on an object labeled "_"
is permitted.
4. Any access requested on an object labeled "*" is permitted.
5. Any access requested by a task on an object with the same
label is permitted.
6. Any access requested that is explicitly defined in the loaded
rule set is permitted.
7. Any other access is denied.
Rules may be explicitly defined by writing subject,object,access
triples to /smack/load.
Smack rule sets can be easily defined that describe Bell&LaPadula
sensitivity, Biba integrity, and a variety of interesting
configurations. Smack rule sets can be modified on the fly to
accommodate changes in the operating environment or even the time
of day.
Some practical use cases:
Hierarchical levels. The less common of the two usual uses
for MLS systems is to define hierarchical levels, often
unclassified, confidential, secret, and so on. To set up smack
to support this, these rules could be defined:
C Unclass rx
S C rx
S Unclass rx
TS S rx
TS C rx
TS Unclass rx
A TS process can read S, C, and Unclass data, but cannot write it.
An S process can read C and Unclass. Note that specifying that
TS can read S and S can read C does not imply TS can read C, it
has to be explicitly stated.
Non-hierarchical categories. This is the more common of the
usual uses for an MLS system. Since the default rule is that a
subject cannot access an object with a different label no
access rules are required to implement compartmentalization.
A case that the Bell & LaPadula policy does not allow is demonstrated
with this Smack access rule:
A case that Bell&LaPadula does not allow that Smack does:
ESPN ABC r
ABC ESPN r
On my portable video device I have two applications, one that
shows ABC programming and the other ESPN programming. ESPN wants
to show me sport stories that show up as news, and ABC will
only provide minimal information about a sports story if ESPN
is covering it. Each side can look at the other's info, neither
can change the other. Neither can see what FOX is up to, which
is just as well all things considered.
Another case that I especially like:
SatData Guard w
Guard Publish w
A program running with the Guard label opens a UDP socket and
accepts messages sent by a program running with a SatData label.
The Guard program inspects the message to ensure it is wholesome
and if it is sends it to a program running with the Publish label.
This program then puts the information passed in an appropriate
place. Note that the Guard program cannot write to a Publish
file system object because file system semanitic require read as
well as write.
The four cases (categories, levels, mutual read, guardbox) here
are all quite real, and problems I've been asked to solve over
the years. The first two are easy to do with traditonal MLS systems
while the last two you can't without invoking privilege, at least
for a while.
Signed-off-by: Casey Schaufler <casey@schaufler-ca.com>
Cc: Joshua Brindle <method@manicmethod.com>
Cc: Paul Moore <paul.moore@hp.com>
Cc: Stephen Smalley <sds@tycho.nsa.gov>
Cc: Chris Wright <chrisw@sous-sol.org>
Cc: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
Cc: "Ahmed S. Darwish" <darwish.07@gmail.com>
Cc: Andrew G. Morgan <morgan@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
James Morris