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What policy is the system running?

From: Daniel J Walsh <dwalsh_at_redhat.com>
Date: Tue, 02 Nov 2004 14:23:13 -0500


We have been doing some work on sestatus and selinuxconfig type tools to be able to tell us about the current running system. We have a problem in that we can not tell which policy is currently running on the system (strict, targeted, mls, ...) It would be usefull if there was a way to identify a name in policy. Then if there was a way to ask the kernel what name it has loaded. One possible way we have thought about doing this is by defining a boolean for each policy that would define the policytype. So we could define a policytype_targeted boolean in targeted policy and a policytype_strict boolean in strict policy. Then we could make scripts and programs smart enough to look for /selinux/booleans/policytype_* to determine it. This is admittedly a hack but would solve our problem without having to modify the kernel. One potential problem with this is that the policy writers could define two policytype_ booleans. Another problem is that there is no requirement to define a boolean of this type.

Other ideas that have been discussed is modifying load_policy and init to write /var/run/policytype or some such, but init runs too early in the boot process to write to the local file system.

Adding a policyname type to policy, changin checkpolicy to require this field, and then modifying the kernel to provide this field in the selinux file system, would probably be the ultimate solution.

One other thing to think about; When we have loadable policymodules, it would be nice to identify which modules are currently loaded, via a similar mechanism.

Ideas???

Dan

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Received on Tue 2 Nov 2004 - 14:23:23 EST
 

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

 
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