Expectation Management for Test Releases

[Tom Mitchell]

On Tue, Apr 20, 2004 at 04:19:40PM -0400, Elliot Lee wrote:
> On Tue, 20 Apr 2004, Chris Adams wrote:
> 
> > Once upon a time, Will Backman <whb at ceimaine.org> said:
....
> > major changes of kernel 2.6 and SElinux); I'm not sure it is realistic
> > though.
....
> Some may not yet be aware that SELinux is going to be disabled by default
> for FC2. It will still be possible to install with it on, and development
> work on it will continue, but it's not ready for prime time.

It is important to separate mechanism from policy.

At this point the mechanism is in good shape and policy is evolving.

Since policy is one of the most complex and difficult aspects
it does make sense.  Management of policy may require changes to
mechanism if solutions in rpm and other tools can not be constructed.

The current policy efforts are building a 'convenient' baseline policy
that does not impose too large a learning curve.  This is the hard
part and many compromises are being made at this time.  It is the
large learning curve that will keep the default 'off'.  

Perhaps SELinux is ready but the prime time audience is not ;-)

To me the most troubling efforts are the interactions with "sudo" use,
pam and "consolehelper" style historic solutions for administration
and security.

One example of this is that there is currently no 1:1 mapping of
policy and "consolehelper" links.  These historic tasks require
elevated permissions and constitute lots of risks.  A policy to allow
these "consolehelper" helper tools to continue running as they have in
the past is not good security science.  The same is true for the pam
controls related to them.

"sudo" is a more difficult task than the "consolehelper" pile of
actions.  There is no way to generate a list of activities to write
policy for.  

A find can locate all the links to "consolehelper" as will an
inspection of the 90 some activities in /etc/pam.d/.  Then there is
the long list of SUID/SGID packages ...


-- 
	T o m  M i t c h e l l 
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