On Thursday 18 October 2007 04:18, Linus Torvalds wrote:

quoted text
> On Wed, 17 Oct 2007, Thomas Fricaccia wrote:

> >

> > But then I noticed that, while the LSM would remain in existence, it was

> > being closed to out-of-tree security frameworks.  Yikes!  Since then,

> > I've been following the rush to put SMACK, TOMOYO and AppArmor

> > "in-tree".

>

> Yeah, it did come up. Andrew, when he sent it on to me, said that the SuSE

> people were ok with it (AppArmor), but I'm with you - I applied it, but

> I'm also perfectly willing to unapply it if there actually are valid

> out-of-tree users that people push for not merging.

The patch doesn't hurt AppArmor, but it's still a step in the wrong direction.
Quoting from commit 20510f2f (Convert LSM into a static interface):

quoted text
> In a nutshell, there is no safe way to unload an LSM.  The modular interface

> is thus unecessary and broken infrastructure.  It is used only by

> out-of-tree modules, which are often binary-only, illegal, abusive of the

> API and dangerous, e.g.  silently re-vectoring SELinux.

This is idiotic. Just because there is no safe way to unload SELinux
 - doesn't mean there is no safe way to unload other LSMs: if nothing

   but that, unloading is handy during development.
 - doesn't mean that module *loading* is unsafe. The patch removes module

   loading as well, which hurts more than removing module unloading.
LSM can be abused ... so what, this doesn't mean the interface is bad. Non-LSM

loadable modules have been known to do lots of bad things, and yet nobody

made them non-loadable either (yet).
> [...]

quoted text
> For example, I do kind of see the point that a "real" security model might

> want to be compiled-in, and not something you override from a module.

Non-trivial modules (i.e., practically everything beyond capabilities) become

effective only after loading policy, anyway. If you can load policy, you can

as well first load a security module without making the system insecure.
Thanks,

Andreas

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