Dbus and security - a few questions

[Colin Walters]

On Fri, 2005-03-04 at 16:37 -0500, seth vidal wrote:

>Let's say I need a root-running daemon that can actually make chroots
>and submit items into chroots to be built. Would it be reasonable and
>safe to use dbus to send these requests to the daemon? Is there any way
>of restricting or validating WHO sent it?

Yes; D-BUS includes a policy framework for restricting messages that can
be sent.  See J5's article and the D-BUS docs, or
browse /etc/dbus-1/system.d for examples.

D-BUS can also act as a SELinux userspace object manager; right now it
can basically just control raw flow between two domains using the
"send_msg" permission; so you could ensure for example that a process
running with type user_t can't converse with a process with type
yourdaemon_t.  Future plans include labeled interfaces for more
fine-grained control.