[Gllug] just preaching to the converted !

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Tue, Oct 25, 2005 at 05:44:36PM +0100, paul wrote:
> I take your point that Linux was designed and continues to be crafted with 
> security inherently at its core - but surely anyone with a strong enough will
> could find exploits that haven't been thought of - so can't be designed for 
> ---- or does that show I'm a little naive and perhaps ill educated about 

Which is why multiple layers of defence are important. SELinux in particular
is a very important capability, because it lets you apply mandatory access
control to each individual process. Thus even if the user a process is running 
as would ordinarily have wide privileges across the machine, the SElinux
role constrains it to the bare minimal access required for its operation.

So, you can say allow acces to file X, TCP port Y, etc, etc. So even if 
the particular network daemon were running as root, and a remotely 
exploitable flaw were found in the daemon, it would not be possible to
exploit it to gain full root - one would merely be able to access file
X, and TCP port Y. Of course figuring out the required policy is a
real PITA, but thankfully people putting together the OS distributions
are defined the policy on behalf of users, so the extra admin burden
is at least reduced to a manageable level.

Dan.
-- 
|=-            GPG key: http://www.berrange.com/~dan/gpgkey.txt       -=|
|=-       Perl modules: http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/              -=|
|=-           Projects: http://freshmeat.net/~danielpb/               -=|
|=-   berrange at redhat.com  -  Daniel Berrange  -  dan at berrange.com    -=|
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