Re: suggestion to help transition to selinux: dynamic loading of libselinux

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl@lkcl.net>]

On Tue, May 18, 2004 at 07:50:34PM +1000, Les Bell wrote:
> 
> "Chris Babcock" <cbabcock@luthresearch.com> wrote:
> 
> >>
> Does this sound dangerous to anybody else?
> <<
> 
> Does the design of SELinux depend on the state machine theory of security,
> i.e. if a system starts in a secure state, and all transitions are secure,
> then the system will remain secure? 

 personally: i assume so (nothing else makes sense) on the basis that
 if you cannot change domain (because either libselinux is unavaiable
 or the programs that _use_ libselinux are somehow corrupted and
 unavailable) then you can go nowhere and therefore do no damage.


> This design would seem unable to
> support that theory, i.e. until the selinux library is loaded, there are no
> constraints on the state of the machine. Just a thought. . .
 
 yes you are right: there are issues, mentioned by russell,
 from initialisation (sysvinit) where if /usr/lib/libselinux.so
 is unavaiable (corrupted and in /lost+found) then the initialisation
 scripts would need to be modified to halt boot-up if the system
 is booted with selinux=1.

 l.


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