How to use other LSM modules

Stephen Smalley sds at epoch.ncsc.mil
Wed Jul 28 19:00:31 UTC 2004


On Wed, 2004-07-28 at 12:44, Bruno Castro da Silva wrote:
> I'm trying to install, on fedora core 2, some modules which
> also use the LSM framework. Currently selinux is disabled
> (/usr/bin/selinuxenabled returns 1), but I can't seem to
> load any other modules.
> 
> I always get the "There is already a security framework
> initialized, register_security failed" error.
> 
> Is there anyway to completly disable selinux or to allow
> other LSM-based software to run?
>
> Also, I think this problem wouldn't exist if selinux was
> compiled as a module. Is there any reason why this isn't so?

Both SELinux and the capability module are built into the kernel (and
normally stack together); if you disable SELinux, then the capability
module simply becomes the primary security module.  So you actually want
to disable the capability module too.  You can boot with selinux=0
capability.disable=1 on the kernel command line to disable them both, I
think.

SELinux needs to be built-in; it requires early initialization in order
to track all kernel objects and apply security labels to them.  Security
subsystem is too tightly coupled to the core kernel anyway to usefully
deal with it as a separate "module"; the LSM API is too large and
tightly coupled to the core kernel, and is not guaranteed any stability
even within the stable kernel series.  We attempted to support SELinux
as a loadable module for a while during the development of LSM, but gave
it up in 2002 in response to feedback from core kernel developers. 

-- 
Stephen Smalley <sds at epoch.ncsc.mil>
National Security Agency




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