Re: Time to remove LSM (was Re: [RESEND][RFC][PATCH 2/7] implementation of LSM hooks)

Serge E. Hallyn
2006-04-20T12:51:43Z

Quoting Stephen Smalley (sds@tycho.nsa.gov):
> On Wed, 2006-04-19 at 11:10 -0700, Greg KH wrote:
> > On Wed, Apr 19, 2006 at 12:33:24PM -0400, James Morris wrote:
> > > The LSM interface is also being abused by several proprietary kernel
> > > modules, some of which are not even security related. In one case,
> > > there's code which dangerously revectors SELinux with a shim layer
> > > designed to try and bypass the GPL. Some of this is a response to
> > > unexporting the syscall table, where projects which abused that have now
> > > switched to LSM.
> >
> > I agree that this is happening today. Which makes me wonder, why is the
> > variable "security_ops" exported through "EXPORT_SYMBOL()" and not
> > "EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL()"? It seems that people are taking advantage of
> > this and changing it would help slow them down a bit.
> >
> > Chris, would you take a patch to change this?
>
> Seems like a rather weak mechanism. Compared to eliminating
> security_ops altogether.

Yup, that'll achieve the goal as well :-)

-serge