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    SubjectRe: Stupid VFS name lookup interface..
    On 5/26/2013 5:02 AM, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
    > On Sat, May 25, 2013 at 11:33:46AM -0700, Casey Schaufler wrote:
    >> Now I'll put on my Smack maintainer hat. Performance improvement is
    >> always welcome, but I would rather see attention to performance of
    >> the LSM architecture than SELinux specific hacks. The LSM blob
    >> pointer scheme is there so that you (Linus) don't have to see the
    >> dreadful things that we security people are doing. Is it time to
    >> get past that level of disassociation? Or, and I really hate asking
    >> this, have you fallen into the SELinux camp?
    > What part of the LSM architecture are you proposing be optimized?

    Secids are an inherent performance issue.

    This thread is all about a performance problem with
    the security blob pointer scheme. I don't know what
    would be better and general, but I'm willing to learn.


    > The
    > LSM layer is pretty thin, partially because the various different
    > security approaches don't agree with each other on fairly fundamental
    > issues. What sort of optimization opportunities you are suggesting?
    > Are there changes that can be made that all of the major security LSM
    > maintainers would actually agree with?

    As you point out, the various existing LSMs use a variety of
    mechanisms to perform their access checks. A big part of what
    I see as the "problem" is that the LSM hooks grew organically,
    at a time when there was exactly one project being funded.
    By the time other LSMs came in to the mainstream we had a
    collection of hooks, not an architecture. The LSM architecture
    has not been seriously revisited since.

    Can we come to agreement? I don't know. I expect so.

    >
    > I've been re-reading the thread on LKML which was spawned when SMACK
    > was proposed for upstream inclusion:
    >
    > http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/585903/focus=586412
    >
    > Have any of the arguments over the proper security models changed over
    > or have gotten resolved over the past six years, while I haven't been
    > looking?

    I believe that Yama points to a serious change in the way
    "operating systems" are being developed. The desktop is not
    the sweet spot for Linux development, nor is the enterprise
    server. Six years ago the Bell & LaPadula subject/object models
    still made sense. Today, we're looking at applications, services
    and resources. We don't have LSMs that support those* natively.
    We are going to have new LSMs, and soon, if Linux is going to
    remain relevant.

    ---
    * SEAndriod is trying. We'll see where that goes.


    >
    > - Ted
    >



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