Re: [PATCH 3/4] security: capabilities patch (version 0.4.4), part 3/4: introduce new capabilities

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Casey Schaufler wrote:
--- Joshua Brindle <[email protected]> wrote:
The first system I took through evaluation
(that is, independent 3rd party analysis) stored
security attributes in a file while the second
and third systems attached the attributes
directly (XFS). The 1st evaluation required
5 years, the 2nd 1 year. It is possible that
I just got a lot smarter with age, but I
ascribe a significant amount of the improvement
to the direct association of the attributes
to the file.
Thats great but entirely irrelevant in this context.
The patch and caps in question are not attached to the file via some externally observable property (eg., xattr) but instead are embedded in the source code so that it can drop caps at certain points during the execution or before executing another app, thus unanalyzable.

Oh that. Sure, we used capability bracketing
in the code, too. That makes it easy to
determine when a capability is active. What,
you don't think that it's possible to analyze
source code? Of course it is. Refer to the
evaluation reports if you don't believe me.

When I see an analysis of every line of source code on an average Linux machine then I might believe you (if you'll grant that no software can ever be installed on it afterward without being analyzed) but until then I'll stick with a centralized policy. I doubt many others will be satisfied with that limitation.

Bracketing hardly makes it analyzable, how can you possibly know if the bracketing happened? You *believe* it will and therefore you say that the bracketed code is safe but in reality this is a discretionary mechanism and you have zero assurance that there is any security whatsoever, no thanks, I'll pass.
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