Re: [RFC][PATCH 0/11] security: AppArmor - Overview

[Stephen Smalley <sds@tycho.nsa.gov>]

On Tue, 2006-04-25 at 14:43 +0200, Andi Kleen wrote:
> On Tuesday 25 April 2006 14:42, James Carter wrote:
> 
> > I talk to one of the unconfined people at the table and ask them to
> > rename the "knife" to "spoon".  Now I am free to do what I wish.
> 
> That assumes that your jail allows talking to other people. 

AppArmor doesn't control IPC (which has been noted previously), and it
isn't clear how one generalizes its path-based scheme to handle all
kinds of kernel operations.  So it isn't even a very good jail-like
mechanism.  Which brings up an interesting topic of its own:  If you
want the AppArmor model, then why not just use existing jail-like or
virtualization mechanisms?  IIUC, Vservers and OpenVZ are already far
more complete in their coverage than AppArmor and leverage existing
kernel mechanisms like namespaces that at least have well-defined
semantics.  I expect that I could achieve a much higher degree of
confidence in such a mechanism than in AppArmor.  Why can't AppArmor
just become a userspace tool for configuring namespaces and setting up
the environment in which the application runs?

> > You don't care about the name "knife", you care about the object it
> > represents.
> 
> In the apparmor model you only care about what the application is allowed
> to do. If it does anything extraordinary like trying to talk to people it 
> shouldn't talk to it gets a veto.

Again, it doesn't control IPC.

-- 
Stephen Smalley
National Security Agency

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