Re: [AppArmor 39/45] AppArmor: Profile loading and manipulation, pathname matching

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

On Thu, 2007-06-21 at 23:17 +0200, Lars Marowsky-Bree wrote:
> On 2007-06-21T16:59:54, Stephen Smalley <sds@tycho.nsa.gov> wrote:
> 
> > Or can access the data under a different path to which their profile
> > does give them access, whether in its final destination or in some
> > temporary file processed along the way.
> 
> Well, yes. That is intentional.
> 
> Your point is?

It may very well be unintentional access, especially when taking into
account wildcards in profiles and user-writable directories.

> > The emphasis on never modifying applications for security in AA likewise
> > has an adverse impact here, as you will ultimately have to deal with
> > application mediation of access to their own objects and operations not
> > directly visible to the kernel (as we have already done in SELinux for
> > D-BUS and others and are doing for X).  Otherwise, your "protection" of
> > desktop applications is easily subverted.
> 
> That is an interesting argument, but not what we're discussing here.
> We're arguing filesystem access mediation.

IOW, anything that AA cannot protect against is "out of scope".  An easy
escape from any criticism.

> > Um, no.  It might not be able to directly open files via that path, but
> > showing that it can never read or write your mail is a rather different
> > matter.
> 
> Yes. Your use case is different than mine.

My use case is being able to protect data reliably.  Yours?

-- 
Stephen Smalley
National Security Agency

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