AppArmor about to be merged into the kernel?
Tony Nelson
tonynelson at georgeanelson.com
Mon Mar 22 16:48:07 UTC 2010
On 10-03-22 01:46:10, Don Quixote de la Mancha wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 10:34 PM, Ed Greshko <Ed.Greshko at greshko.com>
> wrote:
> > Some people will point out that AppArmor comes from the Novell
> > folks and is already integrated with openSUSE. They would also
> > remind folks of the collaboration between Novell and Microsoft.
> >
> > So, when reading the various comparisons make sure you know which
> > bias may be in play.
>
> Heh. That's a good point, but I would remind all of you that SELinux
> comes from No Such Agency.
>
> Which Evil is the Lesser?
Of the TLAs, the NSA is the only one that has ever earned our trust, at
least in matters of security. The classic example comes from DES,
which NSA changed slightly for reasons they would not disclose. A
decade or two later, differential attacks were publicly discussed, and
it turned out that DES was immune to them because of the NSAs changes
to it. Trust is earned, and NSA as earned it as other TLAs have failed
to. All of SELinux is public and open, and it will all have been
looked at and commented on by very untrusting people.
AFAIK, and I really don't, AppArmor is like locking the front door to
one's house, and possibly locking the back door as well if one
remembersto, while normal *nix security (permissions) is more like
putting the valuable data into a safe, so it is locked even if a window
is left open. SELinux uses the *nix model, of locking the inode, not
the pathname to the inode. AIUI, Security people object to AppArmor as
being fundamentally insecure, so if SELinux worked that way, it would
have been about as much effort as it has been without any real
security. But what do I know.
--
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' <http://www.georgeanelson.com/>
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