Les Mikesell wrote:
On Wed, 2005-07-27 at 14:24, Mike McCarty wrote:
[snip]
Since the issue of how the "malware" gets onto my machine is completely bypassed, I consider the answer given in the FAQ to be, well, significantly incomplete."Unknown vulnerabilities" are a reason assumption for any code. Over the years many have been found and fixed in programs included in Linux distributions. The most common involve buffer overflows that allow something sent over the network to be executed accidentally by a program that that was supposed to be doing something else.
I am aware of the Internet Worm.
And augmenting the answer with "We don't know how it might get onto your machine" is, IMO, not an adequate answer. It begs the question.No, you should expect your software to include bugs. It is impossible to prove that it doesn't.
Which is precisely the reason for my question. The more software I introduce into my machine, the more places there are for exploitable defects.
What I mean is, I ask "Why should I run selinux?" The answer then seems to be "We don't know, but if you don't bad things might happen to your system due to malicious programs."A better question is why you should not apply the same logic to the relatively new code in selinux. That is, assuming you should not completely trust code that has been around for a long time and has had bugs exposed and fixed may be reasonable, but then why should you trust selinux not to introduce new bugs and vulnerabilities of its own?
I made this point in another post at one time, about having
to keep after my engineers (when I was a lead) not to introduce
"features" not in the requirements spec. Just more places
for defects to hide.
Mike
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