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SubjectRe: Securelevel bitmap patch


On Sun, 29 Mar 1998, Alan Cox wrote:
>
> I think Linus, you simply don't understand the point, design or structure
> of the BSD securelevel. Please read some of it again a bit more careful.
> The point of securelevel is to provide a partition of trust and control. It
> takes away specific rights root has so as to prevent a user who breaks in
> being able to use root rights to invalidate audit trails.

I know.

And as I pointed out, when done correctly, the _correct_ way allows the
exact same thing.

The difference being that when you do secure-levels correctly, you can use
them for other things too.

> For once Linus you are busy badmouthing something which you quite visibly
> missed the entire point of. The BSD securelevel system does a very specific
> job and does it incredibly well.

They do one job, and they do that one job well.

Earthworms do one thing, and they do one thing incredibly well. I still
consider earthworms to be fairly "intellectually challenged". I'm not
badmouthing them by calling them stupid, I'm just stating facts.

If you do securelevels the way I suggested, you will find that they do
that one job incredibly well too. But you will find that you can use them
for other things AS WELL.

For example, I would personally never be interested in using the BSD kind
of securelevels: by design the BSD securelevels would prevent me from
doing exactly the kinds of things I need to do (ie install a new kernel
and reboot, which is a very obvious security risk).

In short, to me the BSD securelevels are completely useless. Why should I
support them, when there is something that is a _superset_ of the BSD
behaviour, that I could actually find useful (ie I might well want to
limit some people from doing specific things).

Read my email again - I specifically said that if you want the bsd
behaviour you can get it with the per-process-bitmap approach. I don't
want to (I _cannot_) work in that kind of fascist setup, but it certainly
works well enough.

So tell me again: why should I not consider the BSD "one securelevel"
approach stupid, when I can point to another implementation that is not
really any more work, and obviously does a better job of it?

Linus


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