Re: UltraSparc

On Tue, 18 Sep 2001, Carlos Cardenas wrote:

> Has there been any successfull attempt for SELinux on an UltraSparc?

Not as far as I know, but it shouldn't be difficult to port the architecture-specific code of LSM and SELinux to other architectures. Someone ported the architecture-specific code of the original SELinux prototype to the PPC a while back without any real difficulty, and it shouldn't be any harder using the new LSM-based SELinux prototype.

There are a small number of architecture-specific changes in the LSM kernel patch that have only been made for the x86 and ia64 architectures so far. Specifically, LSM adds a general security system call to support new system calls by security modules (see the changes to lsm/arch/i386/kernel/entry.S and lsm/include/asm-i386/unistd.h) and it inserts security hooks into the code of a few system calls in the architecture-specific directories (see the changes to lsm/arch/i386/kernel/ioport.c and lsm/arch/i386/kernel/ptrace.c). And you'll need to add a 'source security/Config.in' to the arch/*/config.in file for your desired architecture. If you port these changes to another architecture, please feed them back to the LSM project - see their web site at lsm.immunix.org.

The SELinux kernel module also contains a little architecture-specific code in selinux/module/selinux_plug/include/asm-i386/flask/unistd.h and selinux/module/selinux_plug/arch/i386/syscalls.c. This code is to implement one additional system call, execve_secure, that I wasn't able to successfully implement using the general security system call. This is an extended version of execve that also passes the requested security identifier to use for the transformed process, invoked by some of our modified daemons and utilities. If you port the architecture-specific version of execve_secure to another architecture, then please feed it back to us.

Another option would be to try using the architecture-independent version of execve_secure (in selinux/module/selinux_plug/syscalls.c) by leaving USE_MD_EXECVE (use machine-dependent execve_secure) undefined in the include/asm-XXX/flask/unistd.file for your architecture. This was an attempt to use the general security system call to implement execve_secure (thus avoiding any architecture-specific code in the SELinux kernel module), but it returns the wrong error code when used to probe the path for some unknown reason, and I haven't tracked down the problem yet. See the comment before the syscalls.c:sys_execve_secure.

As a side note, please be aware that a number of important bug fixes and improvements have been made to both LSM and SELinux since the August 23rd release of SELinux, so I would expect that we are likely to make a new release soon. I would have pushed for a new release already, but we've been waiting for 2.4.10.

--
Stephen D. Smalley, NAI Labs
ssmalley@nai.com





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