Re: [PATCH] Taint kernel when lve module is loaded

[Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>]

On Sat, Jun 23, 2012 at 12:26:41PM -0700, iseletsk@cloudlinux.com wrote:
> On Friday, June 22, 2012 3:43:23 PM UTC-4, Greg KH wrote:
> > On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 12:22:22PM -0700, Greg KH wrote:
> > > On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 07:51:42PM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > > > On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 11:43:59AM -0700, Greg KH wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > > Do you have a pointer to this code anywhere?  Lying about the license to
> > > > > the kernel is a pretty blatent thing to do and I'd like to have some
> > > > > people follow up on that issue.
> > > > 
> > > > http://repo.cloudlinux.com/cloudlinux/5.8/updates-testing/x86_64/RPMS/kmod-lve-2.6.18-408.el5.lve1.1.64.2-1.1-10.7.3.el5.x86_64.rpm 
> > > > - there's no corresponding SRPM in 
> > > > http://repo.cloudlinux.com/cloudlinux/5.8/updates-testing/SRPMS/ and 
> > > > upstream apparently refuse to provide source. Alex Lyashkov (Cc:ed) is 
> > > > listed as module author in the metadata.
> > > 
> > > Hm, and at least one reason it needs to be GPL is due to it using
> > > symbols I created, no fun.
> > > 
> > > Alex, can you please provide the source code for this module?  Or is the
> > > license that the code is saying it is, somehow incorrect?  If so, can
> > > you please fix it?  If you can't do this, is there someone else I should
> > > be contacting?
> > 
> > Also, I almost hate to ask this, but why in the world are you creating
> > sysfs binary files?  I really don't think you should be doing this, as
> > those are only for firmware and other "pass-through" things the kernel
> > uses to have userspace talk directly to hardware.
> > 
> > Odds are you can remove these files, and use the "correct" user/kernel
> > interface which will result in much better speed and handle things
> > properly for you, instead of abusing this interface.
> > 
> > Unless you really are talking directly to hardware, in which case, I'm
> > kind of interested to see what you are doing here, so the source code
> > would be greatly appreciated.
> > 
> > thanks,
> > 
> > greg k-h
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> 
> Greg,
> 
> We do a "hack", which is not a pretty one, populating /sys with
> .htaccess files. This is really needed only by shared hosters, where
> one of the end users on the server, could be a hacker and could create
> symlinks that would later be followed by apache to read privileged
> information.

I don't understand how adding a .htaccess file would solve anything
here.  Are you also adding a .htaccess file to every directory in the
whole system?

> A better fix would be fixing the apache. Yet, surprisingly enough --
> we control kernel on those servers -- but we don't control apache. So
> -- we tried to secure things for our customers in this particular way.
> Most likely we will through it out anyway.

As it's probably not solving anything real, please don't do that :)

greg k-h