On Jun 09, 2007, at 13:32:05, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On Sat, 9 Jun 2007, Kyle Moffett wrote:
On Jun 09, 2007, at 12:46:40, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
so as I understand this with SELinux you will have lots of labels around your system (more as you lock down the system more) you need to define policy so that your unrestricted users must have access to every label, and every time you create a new label you need to go back to all your policies to see if the new label needs to be allowed from that policy

Actually, it's easier than that. There are type attributes which may be assigned to an arbitrary set of types, and each "type" field in an access rule may use either a type or an attribute. So you don't actually need to modify existing rules when adding new types, you just add the appropriate existing attributes to your new type. For example, you could set up a "logfile" attribute which allows logrotate to archive old versions and allows audit- admin users to modify/delete them, then whenever you need to add a new logfile you just declare the "my_foo_log_t" type to have the "logfile" attribute.

isn't this just the flip side of the same problem?

every time you define a new attribute you need to go through all the files and decide if the new attribute needs to be given to that file.

No you don't, you can add attributes to a type after-the-fact. In concept this problem is very similar to programming: You have various documented interfaces used by different policy files to interact with each other. As long as your policy files conform to the documented interfaces then you *DONT* have to manually inspect each file because you can make basic assumptions. On the other hand, when you break that interface "contract" you will get very unexpected results. For the above example:

My syslog policy file would create a "logfile" attribute and types for "/var/log/auth/auth.log", "/var/log/kern/kern.log", and "/var/log/ messages". It would also create a "logdaemon" attribute which has automatic type transitions to create files in different "/var/log/*" directories Finally, it would allow the syslogd type to create and append to its specific file types for "auth.log", "kern.log", and "messages".

My logrotate policy file would depend on the syslog policy and would declare the logrotate daemon type as a "logdaemon", and additionally allow logrotate to read, rename, append, and delete "logfile" types. Since logrotate is a "logdaemon", it already has the appropriate type transitions for new types.

My samba policy file would depend on the syslog policy and would declare the samba daemon type as a "logdaemon" and the "/var/log/ samba/*" type as a "logfile". Then it would add a type transition rule so when "logdaemon" creates new files in "samba_log_dir_t", they have the appropriate "samba_log_t" label. Finally, samba would allow itself to append to "samba_log_t" files.

Note that now when "logrotate" runs and rotates files in /var/log/ samba, it will automatically create the new files with type "samba_log_t", even though there are no *direct* associations between those types. If the syslog policy file was poorly written it could seriously adversely affect the security of the system, but hopefully that's obvious :-D. Policy development is _hard_, it's a whole separate state-machine and pseudo-programming-language that should mostly be left to security professionals or very experienced developers/sysadmins.

Cheers,
Kyle Moffett

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