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Re: avc: granted null messages

From: James Morris <jmorris_at_namei.org>
Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2007 11:09:03 +1100 (EST)


On Tue, 18 Dec 2007, Eamon Walsh wrote:

> Stephen Smalley wrote:
> > If a (buggy) caller passes a requested permission value of zero to
> > avc_has_perm, it correctly returns a permission denial (if enforcing),
> >
>
> Now I'm questioning why we don't just return success. Doesn't everyone have
> permission to do nothing? It seems odd to think that a process could receive
> "granted" for a set of permissions A, but "denied" for a subset of A.

Given that the caller is buggy, we don't really know what it's trying to do, so denying access seems prudent.

Can we get the audit log to produce something unparseable by audit2allow, as we don't _want_ policy being generated in response to a buggy caller ?

>
>
> > but avc_audit will report it as a granted message with a "null" access
> > vector (also if enforcing) due to the way in which avc_audit checks for
> > the denied case. This was reported for nscd in
> > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=352601,
> > but applies to both the libselinux AVC and the kernel AVC.
> >
> > In permissive mode, avc_has_perm permits the operation, and avc_audit
> > reports nothing at all.
> >
> > So the question is how do we want to handle this case?
> >
> > It is a bug in the caller, but making it a BUG_ON() in the kernel and an
> > assert() in libselinux doesn't seem very graceful, especially if in
> > permissive mode.
> >
> > We could easily adjust avc_audit() to report it as a denied message with
> > a 'null' access vector, although running audit2allow on that output will
> > yield a broken policy module.
> >
> >
>
>
>

-- 
James Morris
<jmorris@namei.org>

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Received on Tue 18 Dec 2007 - 19:09:18 EST
 

Date Posted: Jan 15, 2009 | Last Modified: Jan 15, 2009 | Last Reviewed: Jan 15, 2009

 
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