Re: [PATCH 00/16] [RFC PATCH] Signed kexec support

Vivek Goyal
2013-09-16T14:30:04Z

On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 02:24:10PM -0400, Mimi Zohar wrote:

[..]
> > > So existing IMA does not seem to have been written for an environment
> > > where all the user space is not signed we don't trust root and root can
> > > attack a signed binary. And my patches try to fill that gap.
> >
> > It sounds like your changes should go into the IMA core code to resolve
> > the issues there, as I'm sure they want to also protect from the issues
> > you have pointed out here. Have you talked to those developers about
> > this?
>
> IMA assumes a different threat model and performance tradeoffs. The
> solutions suggested for the kexec, single userspace application threat
> model, presumably wouldn't scale very well.

Hi Mimi,

Does IMA trust root or not? I got a feeling that IMA is assuming that
root is trusted. Otherwise root can do raw writes to disk and bypass
all the logic related to appraisal result caching.

In fact on my system root disk belongs to group "disk". So any user in
"disk" group seems to be a trusted user for IMA to work.

Thanks
Vivek