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Date:      Sun, 7 Jan 2001 11:54:23 -0500 (EST)
From:      Evan S <kaworu@sektor7.ath.cx>
To:        Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org>
Cc:        Kris Kennaway <kris@FreeBSD.org>, freebsd-security@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: changing kernsecurelevel
Message-ID:  <Pine.GSO.4.10.10101071151580.5155-100000@wintermute.sekt7>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1010107112140.27948E-100000@fledge.watson.org>

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Mm, Openroot runs on -CURRENT, and users are able to apply those flags to 
files. But, I made a little patch, and it seems to work. They're not able
to do it anymore.

Other than that I'm happy with the way Jail works. The above was the only
problem I had.

Thanks,
Evan Sarmiento (kaworu@sektor7.ath.cx)
http://sekt7.org/es

On Sun, 7 Jan 2001, Robert Watson wrote:

> 
> On Sun, 7 Jan 2001, Evan S wrote:
> 
> > Mm, I want secure level to be 2 at times because then I can chflags schg
> > the login.conf file inside the Jail, and limit cpu usage, memory usage,
> > incase anyone fork bombs.
> > 
> > That's alright though, I am working on giving a jail its own secure level,
> > and its going pretty well..
> 
> At least in -CURRENT, processes within a jail should be unable to
> manipulate the system file flags, meaning that from that perspective, jail
> should already appear to have a lower securelevel.  The goal of this
> change from the original jail code was that this would allow the
> administrator to share files between jails and have some confidence that
> this would not be a channel of communication or attack between the jails. 
> I believe this was backported, so you may want to confirm, on a plain
> vanilla system, that a change is actually required there.
> 
> Which features (other than the device-opening one which I pointed out in a
> prior e-mail) have you identified which do not work under securelevels,
> but do work in jail()?  In general, features disabled were selected on two
> criteria: 
> 
> 1) The ability to use the feature to "break out of securelevels" -- i.e.,
>    influence the running kernel, or replace the kernel and its supporting
>    files.  This means protecting kmem, providing a system immutable file
>    service, monotonically increasing securelevels only, and so on,
>    directly access disk devices, and so on. 
> 
> 2) At higher securelevels, the ability to change security-sensitive system
>    configuration.  For example, the ability to change firewall rules.
> 
> There are probably some other miscellaneous securelevel details, but not
> many.  It should be noted that there is substantial overlap between (1)
> above, and the goal of jail(), which was:
> 
> 1) Prevent processes within jail() from being able to "break out of jail"
>    -- that is, influence the running kernel to remove the restrictions in
>    place, influence processes outside of the jail() in question,
>    protecting against inappropriate direct disk devices access, and so on. 
> 
> Therefore, it's arguable that jail() protections and securelevel
> protections should have a lot of overlap, although some protections are
> done in different ways.  Securelevels prevents opening of devices, whereas
> jail() limits the creation of devices (and assumes the administrator is
> careful about which devices are created in the jail() namespace).  Jail() 
> sharply limits a number of operations that are permitted with
> securelevels, such as manipulating the file system namespace using
> chroot() or mount(), whereas securelevels allow this to some extent. 
> Jail() has process namespace scoping, but securelevels have no need for
> this functionality.  Both securelevels and jail() limit certain
> configuration activities, but for different reasons: jail() usually
> restricts them because they impact processes outside of the scope of the
> jail().  If you identify things restricted by securelevel and not jail(),
> we should be considering changing jail() to be more restrictive. 
> 
> Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Project
> robert@fledge.watson.org      NAI Labs, Safeport Network Services
> 
> 
> 



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