Re: [PATCH] Dynamic port labeling V2

From: Joshua Brindle
Date: Thu Dec 03 2009 - 14:39:40 EST


Paul Nuzzi wrote:
Second version of the dynamic port labeling patch. Changed the name of
the selinuxfs interface to portcon and changed the interface to only
allow five arguments instead of the variable four or five.

Added a mechanism to add/delete/update port labels with an interface in
the selinuxfs filesystem. This will give administrators the ability to
update port labels faster than reloading the entire policy with
semanage. The administrator will also need less privilege since they
don't have to be authorized to reload the full policy.

A listing of all port labels will be output if the file /selinux/portcon
is read. Labels could be added or deleted with the following commands

echo -n "del system_u:object_r:ssh_port_t:s0 6 22 22"> /selinux/portcon
echo -n "add system_u:object_r:telnetd_port_t:s0 6 22 22"> /selinux/portcon


Aside from the conversation Dave and Casey are having I still think this isn't quite right. First, while you can atomically change a single port label with the add command above you can't atomically change multiple entries, which I think is completely necessary (you don't want to have strange labeling states when changing a set of ports to a new label.

Also, if you are dealing with ranges you need to essentially pop off all the specific ports, change the range and push all the specific ports back on. With the current interface I don't see how that is possible at all.

Also, while having a text parser in the kernel makes it easier to use with echo I think it is alot of code in the kernel for no good reason. There is no reason not to make a userspace tool that converts the textual representation into a serialized struct and feed it to the kernel. We typically tell users not to mess around in /selinux anyway, since we have a libselinux interface to do that.

We also need to be able to get that information back out somehow, and we need to be able to keep the on-disk policy consistent with the changes we are making at runtime. setsebool -P does this, but it rebuilds the policy, which you are trying to avoid. How do you make these portcon changes persist across reboots? I don't imagine very many scenarios where you only want to temporarily change portcons.

It seems like you'd need to manage an on-disk file of all the ports and load them right after loading the policy (which is still racy but the default port sid should prevent any traffic on the ports.

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