Re: [PATCH] capabilites, take 2

[Andy Lutomirski <luto@myrealbox.com>]

Stephen Smalley wrote:

> On Fri, 2004-05-14 at 08:03, Albert Cahalan wrote:
> 
>>This would be an excellent time to reconsider how capabilities
>>are assigned to bits. You're breaking things anyway; you might
>>as well do all the breaking at once. I want local-use bits so
>>that the print queue management access isn't by magic UID/GID.
>>We haven't escaped UID-as-priv if server apps and setuid apps
>>are still making UID-based access control decisions.
> 
> 
> Capabilities are a broken model for privilege management; try RBAC/TE
> instead.  http://www.securecomputing.com/pdf/secureos.pdf has notes
> about the history and comparison of capabilities vs. TE.
> 
> Instead of adding new capability bits, replace capable() calls with LSM
> hook calls that offer you finer granularity both in operation and in
> object-based decisions, and then use a security module like SELinux to
> map that to actual permission checks.  SELinux provides a framework for
> defining security classes and permissions, including both definitions
> used by the kernel and definitions used by userspace policy enforcers
> (ala security-enhanced X).
> 

Thanks -- turning brain back on, SELinux is obviously better than any
fine-grained capability scheme I can imagine.

So unless anyone convinces me you're wrong, I'll stick with just
fixing up capabilities to work without making them finer-grained.

--Andy