Re: [PATCH] remove sys_security

[Crispin Cowan]

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Alan Cox wrote:

>On Thu, 2002-10-17 at 21:10, Greg KH wrote:
>  
>
>>Ok, I think it's time for someone who actually cares about the security
>>syscall to step up here to try to defend the existing interface.  I'm
>>pretty sure Ericsson, HP, SELinux, and WireX all use this, so they need
>>to be the ones defending it.
>>    
>>
>The existing interface is basically the one Linus asked for, although
>perhaps with a little less thought on the structure side than it would
>have benefitted
>
The intent behind the syscall interface was that it needed to be generic 
enough to support the 50+ syscalls that SELinux wants, and also be 
generic enough to support potential modules that have not been invented 
yet. That's why it is a MUX, and why the signature definition is enough 
to deal with stacked modules and then pass a generic argv list to the 
module itself.

Unfortunately, this design goal (highly generic interface) is 
incompatible with the 32/64 bit transparancy layer that several 
supported architectures need. As Christoph says, this is unfixable. 
IMHO, it is unfixable because of conflicting design goals: you cannot 
have a truly generic syscall interface and hope for it to port clean 
from 32 bits to 64 bits.

Therefore, the sys_security syscall has been removed. LSM-aware 
applications that want to talk to security modules can do so through a 
file system interface. This will work for WireX, and Smalley says it 
will work for SELinux. I hope it will work for others.

Again, my thanks for eveyone's help in cleaning up this issue, and my 
apologies to anyone I may have offended. We should have thought about 
the 32/64 bit issue when we defined that interface. Kudos to Greg K-H, 
who told me that this syscall would be a problem.

Thanks,
    Crispin

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