On Mon, 2004-11-08 at 05:54, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> hi,
>
> this is going to sound a bit weird and i will do my best to _not_
> confuse matters.
>
> has anyone considered writing selinux policy - and using it instead of
> unix authorisation - for networked fileservers?
>
> (note i didn't say authentication there).
>
> in other words, you write an selinux policy which dictates the
> circumstances under which users are allowed access to files
> off of a networked file server.
>
> ... or is that what the selinux-nfs patches do, already?

There are no differences in the policy used for selinux-nfs. There is an assumption that the client and server have the same policy (At least to the extent that the client and server agree on what accesses to allow.)

For selinux-nfs, the client sends the security context of the process wanting to access files on the NFS server. The server uses that security context to make its access decision and then sends the security context of the files back to the client. The client then can use that security context for accesses to the cache, or display it if the request was something like an 'ls -Z'. In the case of a setxattr, the client would also send the security context that the client's process wants the file to have. Being NFS, the client is still trusted.

-- 
James Carter <jwcart2@epoch.ncsc.mil>
National Security Agency

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