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What is Valid SE Linux Policy?

Guido Trentalancia started an interesting discussion on the SE Linux policy development list about how to manage the evolution of the policy [1].

The Problem

The SE Linux policy is the set of rules that determine what access is granted. It assigns types to files and domains to processes and has a set of rules that specify all the permitted interactions between processes and files (among many other things). The policy evolves over time to match the requirements of programs (applications and daemons). As a program evolves the things that it does will change and the SE Linux policy will tend to evolve to permit the set of all operations that were requested by all versions because people only complain when things stop working not when excessive privilege is granted. So we need to periodically remove old allow rules from the policy.

One difficulty in this regard is the fact that multiple versions of programs are often available for use at the same time. Debian in particular has a good history of providing separate packages for the old and new versions of programs such as Apache to meet the needs of users who want the tried and tested version and of users who want the newer version with better performance, more features, better documentation, or something else good. There is also a demand to have the same policy work with multiple versions of a distribution without excessive effort. Finally all the distributions that have SE Linux support have different people deciding when the new version of a daemon is ready for inclusion and therefore there is a need to support multiple versions for multiple distributions. So support for older versions of daemons can’t be removed easily.

One of the things I do to make these things a little easier to manage is to put ifdef(`distro_debian', ` before any Debian specific bits of policy. When policy is conditional and only used in Debian I can freely remove it at any future time if Debian works well without it. Also it doesn’t matter if such Debian specific policy allows access that is not needed or desired in other distributions, the only down-side to this is that sometimes other distributions need to repeat work that I did, they determine what access is needed for their configuration and discover that it was already enabled for Debian.

What is Valid Policy?

We went to only have “Valid Policy” (as described by Christopher J. PeBenito), so the challenge is determining what is Valid Policy.

It seems to me that there are three type of access granted by valid policy (it is debatable whether type #3 is valid):

  1. Access that is needed for an application to perform it’s minimal designed task.
  2. Access that is needed for the application to perform all the optional configurations, EG an ftpd running from inetd or as a daemon, and daemons like http server being granted access to ssl keys or not.
  3. Access that is needed to perform all the operations the application requests, but which the application doesn’t require or shouldn’t require if it worked correctly.

Some common operations that aren’t required include opening utmp for write, searching /root, and many other relatively innocuous access attempts which don’t affect the program operation if they are denied. There are also many things such as writing temporary files to /root that don’t seem unusual if the application developer is not considering SE Linux (but which are often considered bad practice anyway). Some of these things (like using /root for stuff that belongs in /var/lib) have the potential to break things (for the daemon or for other system processes) even if you don’t consider SE Linux.

How to deal with those types:

  1. In most cases this can be determined without too much effort. For example a web server needs to listen on port 80 and read files and directories that relate to data. When writing policy I can write a lot of the allow rules without even testing the application because I know from the design what it will do. A large part of the other access is obvious in a “I can’t believe I didn’t realise it would need this” sense.
  2. The main question here is whether we have booleans (settings which can be tuned at run-time by the sysadmin which determine how the policy works) to specify which optional tasks or whether we allow all access for optional configurations by default. The secondary question is when certain unusual corner cases should be not supported at all such that the people who do such unusual corner cases need to use audit2allow to generate local policy to allow their operations.
  3. Sometimes we have to allow things that we really don’t like. Even when we write policy to allow a daemon to do unusual things (such as using /root instead of /var/lib) it’s still a lot better than running without SE Linux. Also SE Linux policy to allow such obviously broken things stands out and is a constant reminder that the daemon needs fixing, this is better than allowing symptoms of broken design to be forgotten.

How to Improve the Situation

We could have comments in the policy source for everything that is in category 3. If the comments had a fixed format so that a recursive grep could find them all then it would allow us to more easily remove the gross things from the policy at a later date.

But it seems to me that the main problem is a lack of people working on this. I am not aware of any people actively testing Debian policy for excessive privilege in regard to such issues.

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