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SubjectRe: Secure-linux and standard kernel
MOLNAR Ingo wrote:
>
> On Wed, 24 Jun 1998, Mitchell Blank Jr wrote:
>
> > Andi Kleen wrote:
> > > If you want to make this secure you hooks in the startup code to drop priviledges even
> > > earlier I think.
> >
> > Yuk.
> >
> > The real fix will come in 2.3 when ext2 can interface with the capabilities
> > stuff. Until then, this will help things. Coming up with an ugly kludge
> > (different startup code, different ld.so, etc) is just a distraction from
> > real goals like:
> >
> > 1. Making sure the startup code and ld.so are bullet-proof. If this isn't
> > the case the system isn't going to be secure worth a damn anyway.
> > Avoiding the problem for a few binaries by writing an alternate loader
> > only results in there being more of this code around to audit.
> >
> > 2. Working towards the filesystem set-capability stuff as mentioned above.
>
> the point is, we dont even need the filesystem set-capability stuff. By
> including this feature in the ELF loading mechanizm somehow, _all_
> filesystems (that support setuid root) will benefit from this, not only
> ext2fs. Theoretically, we only need a single bit in the inode to indicate
> that a binary is trusted. The rest can be done in ELF-land.

This may sound over the top, but follow the logic here.

Here is a crazy Idea, what about having all suid / dangerous programs be
split into client /server through unix domain sockets. You could then
chroot an envoronment for users that would have access to the unix
domain files, and never have a user execute suid ever agian. I know
that getting programs to work under this environment would be a hassle,
but for truly secure systems, it would be nice to be sure that users
cannot execute privledged code ever, execpt through a set protocol. Any
devience could be logged, and the system could also track users if
neccessary.

Any takers?



-Eric

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