On Sun, 2006-01-29 at 12:33 +0100, David Härdeman wrote:
> >Why would you want to use proxy certificates for you own use? Use your
> >own certificate for your own processes, and issue one or more proxy
> >certificates to any daemon that you want to authorise to do some limited
> >task.
>
> I meant that you can't use proxy certs for your own use, so you still need
> to store your own cert/key somehow...and I still believe that the kernel
> keyring is the best place...
Agreed. Now, reread what I said above, and tell me why this is an
argument for doing dsa in the kernel?
> >...and what does this statement about "keys being safer in the kernel"
> >mean?
>
> swap-out to disk, ptrace, coredump all become non-issues. And in
> combination with some other security features (such as disallowing
> modules, read/write of /dev/mem + /dev/kmem, limited permissions via
> SELinux, etc), it becomes pretty hard for the attacker to get your
> private key even if he/she manages to get access to the root account.
Turning off coredump is trivial. All the features that LSM provide apply
to userland too (including security_ptrace()), so the SELinux policies
are not an argument for putting stuff in the kernel.
Only the swap-out to disk is an issue, and that is less of a worry if
you use a time-limited proxy in the daemon.
> >> Further, the mpi and dsa code can also be used for supporting signed
> >> modules and binaries...the "store dsa-keys in kernel" part adds 376
> >> lines of code (counted with wc so comments and includes etc are also
> >> counted)...
> >
> >Signed modules sounds like a better motivation, but is a full dsa
> >implementation in the kernel really necessary to achieve this?
>
> How would you do it otherwise?
Has anyone tried to look for simpler signing mechanisms that make use of
the crypto algorithms that are already in the kernel?
Cheers,
Trond
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