transition problems

[Stephen Smalley]

On Tue, 2004-12-28 at 14:43, Oleg Museyko wrote:
>         Although innd.te is the usual example of policy, i still can't
>         get it start right from the init-script.

The example was likely written up pre-Fedora, and having 'su' change the
security context (via pam_selinux) was introduced by Fedora.

>  (Fedora Core 2,
>         policy-sources-1.11.3-3). 
>         The problem is near the 'su', IMHO. Namely, when innd runs from
>         script as
>         
>                 su -s /bin/bash - news -c /etc/rc.news

In FC3, this has been addressed by introducing a separate 'runuser'
program, I believe.  Using su in this manner isn't a good idea even
without SELinux in the picture.  

>         This caused by
>         su - news -c "unset LANG; unset LC_COLLATE; /usr/lib/news/bin/nntpsend"

Likewise, using 'su' in this manner considered harmful.

>         Also, i'd like to ask the reason of why some file type
>         transitions doesn't work on sockets. E.g., when
>         winbindd (runs in smbd_t) creates the socket in the
>         directory of samba_var_t type and clients try to use it,
>         the log file are full of deny { connectto } unix_stream_socket
>         with smbd_t in tcontext. At the same time the /path/to/socket/file
>         has correct samba_var_t type.  The situation doesn't
>         change if i write
>         file_type_auto_trans(smbd_t, samba_var_t, samba_var_t, sock_file)

A Unix domain socket has two separate but related objects:  the socket
itself and the file by which it is named.  They are separate objects
with separate permission checks applied.  The socket is labeled based on
the creating process and the connectto permission check lets you
establish a direct relationship between the peers.  The file is labeled
in accordance with the usual file typing rules, and the normal file
write check is applied to it.  The can_unix_connect() macro is typically
used to grant the peer-to-peer permission.

-- 
Stephen Smalley <sds at epoch.ncsc.mil>
National Security Agency