On Thu, 30 Aug 2007, J. Bruce Fields wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 30, 2007 at 11:04:00AM -0400, Trond Myklebust wrote:
> > With CIFS or other password based protocols (including RPCSEC_GSS)
>
> Well, rpcsec_gss isn't inherently password based, and you can
> authenticate in some way that doesn't actually give away your password
> (or other long-lived credential).
>
> > What I'm saying is that the superuser can pretty much do whatever it
> > takes to grab either your kerberos password (e.g. install a keyboard
> > listener), a stored credential (read the contents of your kerberos
> > on-disk credential cache), or s/he can access the cached contents of the
> > file by hunting through /dev/kmem.
> >
> > IOW: There is no such thing as security on a root-compromised machine.
>
> And in theory a kernel could provide *some* guarantees against root,
> right? (Is there some reason a unix-like kernel must provide such
> things as /dev/kmem?)
/dev/kmem was just an example -- IMHO differentiating between kernel and
userspace from a security p.o.v. is always tricky. Like Trond said, there
are very high number of ways in which privileged userspace can compromise
a running kernel if it really wants to do that, root-is-God has always
been *the* major problem with Unix :-)
The only _real_ way a kernel can lock itself completely against malicious
userspace involves trusted tamperproof hardware, but even that only if
you can get yourself to believe such a thing exists in the first place ;-)
Satyam
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