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

Stephen Smalley
2006-04-20T12:36:11Z

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.

--
Stephen Smalley
National Security Agency