From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Sep 21 16:13:59 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from xylan.com (postal.xylan.com [208.8.0.248]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5150514F89 for ; Tue, 21 Sep 1999 16:13:57 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from wes@softweyr.com) Received: from mailhub.xylan.com by xylan.com (8.8.7/SMI-SVR4 (xylan-mgw 2.2 [OUT])) id QAA13486; Tue, 21 Sep 1999 16:13:15 -0700 (PDT) Received: from omni.xylan.com by mailhub.xylan.com (SMI-8.6/SMI-SVR4 (mailhub 2.1 [HUB])) id QAA26909; Tue, 21 Sep 1999 16:00:20 -0700 Received: from softweyr.com (dyn4.utah.xylan.com) by omni.xylan.com (4.1/SMI-4.1 (xylan engr [SPOOL])) id AA28977; Tue, 21 Sep 99 16:13:13 PDT Message-Id: <37E81109.E7612259@softweyr.com> Date: Tue, 21 Sep 1999 17:13:13 -0600 From: Wes Peters Organization: Softweyr LLC X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en] (X11; U; FreeBSD 3.1-RELEASE i386) X-Accept-Language: en Mime-Version: 1.0 To: Warner Losh Cc: John-Mark Gurney , FreeBSD Hackers List Subject: Re: what is devfs? References: <19990921000009.54622@hydrogen.fircrest.net> <19990920231629.26284@hydrogen.fircrest.net> <199909212040.OAA27457@harmony.village.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Warner Losh wrote: > > Devices must failsafe from a security point of view in the absense of > a devfsd. Otherwise there will extreme opposition from the security > officer. This means 0600 or more restrictive permissions. While it > doesn't happen often, it must be designed for. Otherwise you've > replaced a secure, predictible system with an insecure one, which is > not acceptible at all in the base FreeBSD product. > > How permissions are saved, devices are given out for use I don't care > too much about so long as it is secure. > > In general, it is very hard to secure a system where things aren't > predictable. Is there any possibility of creating a database of devfs perms that gets loaded into kernel-accessible data space by the loader before boot? Once the system is up, devfsd could take over, monitoring and updating the state of devfs and this database, and the perms would come up as they were last set, modulo the cycle time of devfsd. -- "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?" Wes Peters Softweyr LLC wes@softweyr.com http://softweyr.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message