Gentoo Archives: gentoo-hardened

From: Tad <tadglines@×××××××.net>
To: gentoo-hardened@g.o
Subject: [gentoo-hardened] SElinux+XFS
Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2003 06:03:09
Message-Id: 002c01c3ae62$ca9b28a0$0301a8c0@sprite
1 For anyone that is interested, I've created a patch to XFS that adds the
2 security.* extended attribute namespace needed by SElinux.
3
4 I've created two patches.
5 This (http://www.glines.com/xfs.patch.bz2) contains only the changes too
6 XFS.
7 This (http://www.glines.com/2.4.21-xfs+selinux.patch.bz2) can be applied
8 against a vanilla 2.4.21 kernel and will give you SElinux and a SElinux
9 friendly XFS.
10
11 Internally XFS distinguishes between user and trusted attributes via a flag
12 (XFS_ATTR_ROOT). If just modified xfs_iops.c is modified, the security.*
13 attributes also appear in the user.* namespace. I saw two ways fix this.
14
15 One option was to store the security.* attributes in either the trusted or
16 user namespace. Then hack the XFS internals so that any user.security.* or
17 trusted.security.* attribute would not appear in trusted or user but would
18 appear as if it was in the security namespace. I didn't like this option
19 because it was going to be a more complicated code chage. That, and it just
20 felt like a hack.
21
22 The other option was to add true support for the security namespace. This
23 would require adding a flag to the attribute's flags bitfield. I liked this
24 option because it was simpler to code and just looked cleaner. The bit slot
25 I chose appears to be unused. At least I could find no place in the code
26 that uses it. If security.* attributes are set and the filesystem is then
27 mounted with a standard XFS kernel, those attributes will appear in the user
28 namespace.
29
30 I haven't looked at xfsdump/xfsrestore so I don't know if they will require
31 changes. I'm hoping that they take the flags field whole and don't do
32 anything with it that could disrupt the new XFS_ATTR_SECURITY bit.
33
34 -Tad
35
36
37 --
38 gentoo-hardened@g.o mailing list

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-hardened] SElinux+XFS Chris PeBenito <pebenito@g.o>