Re: [AppArmor 00/41] AppArmor security module overview

Pavel Machek
2007-04-12T19:58:46Z

Hi!

> AppArmor's Overall Design
> =========================
>
> AppArmor protects systems from vulnerable software by confining
> processes, giving them "least privilege" access to the system's
> resources: with least privilege, processes are allowed exactly what they
> need, nothing more, and nothing less. Systems are thus protected from
> bugs in applications that would lead to privilege escalation, such as
> remote system access because of a buffer overflow in a web server, etc.
>
> AppArmor does this by defining application profiles which list allowed
> accesses, and assigning those profiles to processes. AppArmor does *not*

You can do the same with ptrace. If that's not fast enough... improve
ptrace?

> The corollary to this is that attacks against AppArmor that start with
> "assume some unconfined process does ..." are outside the AppArmor
> threat model. Any process that might do something malicious to an

IOW AppArmor is broken by design. (One reason is: operations by unconfined
processes that did not use to be security sensitive before -- ln
shadow random_name -- are security sensitive now.)

Pavel
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