Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 26 Oct 1999 15:24:04 -0400 (EDT) | From | John Langford <> | Subject | Re: Sealing the kernel |
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> from root. Sure you can keep them out of the kernel level stuff. But > what good is that really? The root user could still do nasty things to > your system regardless.
Ultimately, I think sealing the kernel just makes _subtle_ "nasty things" more difficult. System crashes from a hostile root are probably unavoidable but what won't be possible is loading a 'stealth module' which hides some set of processes and files from all user-land utilities without crashing. If we can boot off a readonly media, this denial of subtle nastiness can be extended across reboots.
I don't really fear random crackers who make their presence known immediately. I tend to fear the ones who don't make their presence known.
The alternative is to build a kernel without module support and /dev/mem disallowed. That's a bit awkward for some situations (do you really want to compile a new kernel for every single different machine?) and just won't work well for others (pcmcia without modules is impractical).
-John
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