On Wed, 2017-07-19 at 17:08 -0400, Paul Moore wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 17, 2017 at 4:06 PM, Andy Lutomirski <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> > On Fri, Jul 14, 2017 at 9:46 AM, Stephen Smalley <[email protected]
> > > wrote:
> > 
> > At the risk of commenting on SELinux in general:
> > 
> > > There is no way to clone all allow rules from
> > > descendants to their ancestors in policy currently, and doing so
> > > would
> > > be undesirable even if it were practical, as it requires leaking
> > > permissions to objects and operations into ancestor domains that
> > > could
> > > weaken their own security in order to allow them to the
> > > descendants
> > > (e.g. if a descendant requires execmem permission, then so do all
> > > of
> > > its ancestors ...
> > 
> > In my mind, permissions like execmem aren't in the same category as
> > normal permissions.  execmem is the right to do something that
> > opens
> > the subject to compromise, not the right to do something to an
> > object
> > that needs protection.  Maybe execmem should be exempt from
> > typebounds.
> 
> I just realized that this got lost in the rest of the discussion ...
> 
> It's worth nothing that from a practical point of bounded type
> transitions aren't likely going to be the solution that will likely
> be
> used to solve this current systemd problem (see the rest of the
> thread).
> 
> However, I understand you were speaking in general terms, and while
> there may be some merit to your suggestion, that would be quite a
> deviation from how things work at the moment and unless typebounds
> takes off (which I am beginning to doubt will happen outside a few
> special domains) I'm not sure it is worth the effort and headache.

I also don't see how execmem is fundamentally different than the other
examples I gave in the patch description; there would still be the
problem of leaking execute access to files, read to symlinks, ...

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