One for the Security Guru's

["Robert L. Harris" <Robert.L.Harris@rdlg.net>]

  Once there was a company durring the dot.com boom.  This company had 
some outside consultants come in and tell them how to do a number of
things.  Many of the things were laughed off but some stuck.  2 things
in particular are giving me nightmares now that I'm at this company.
They have survived the bust and I think will actually stand a very good
chance to be very important in the near future so I want to see them
stay sane, stable and secure.

  The consultants aparantly told the company admins that kernel modules
were a massive security hole and extremely easy targets for root kits.
As a result every machine has a 100% monolithic kernel, some of them
ranging to 1.9Meg in filesize.  This of course provides some other
sticky points such as how to do a kernel boot image.

  I'd like it from the guru's on exactly how bad a hole this really is
and if there is a method in the kernel that will prevent such exploits.
For example, if I disable CONFIG_MODVERSIONS is the kernel less likely
to accept a module we didn't build?  Are there plans to implement some
form of finger printing on modules down the road?

Thanks for your imput guys,
  Robert



:wq!
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Robert L. Harris                
                               
DISCLAIMER:
      These are MY OPINIONS ALONE.  I speak for no-one else.
FYI:
 perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5,(41*2),sqrt(7056),(unpack(c,H)-2),oct(115),10);'