Re: [Xen-devel] protecting xen startup

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl@xxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Nov 23, 2004 at 10:49:24PM +0000, Mark Williamson wrote:
> >is there anything preventing that interface from being removed, such
> >that the client/server bit is munged into a single application?
> 
> In older releases, there wasn't a Xend.  Instead we had a set of 
> management scripts that called various operations directly.  You could in 
> principle munge xm and xend together into a big megatool but it wouldn't 
> be pretty.

 i'll take that as a challenge, then :)

> Xend makes concurrency control much easier, provides a central point of 
> contact regarding machine state and demuxes the virtual consoles of the 
> domain.  You'd have to address these problems in addition to combining the 
> tools, which would take a fair bit of hacking to do properly.

 okay.

 assuming that 1) i don't want a central point of contact i only want
 _one_ point of contact and 2) i can live without virtual consoles
 until i understand the code enough and can get away with
 using ssh logins instead:

 would this be a simple enough task for someone not entirely
 familiar with xen's code [but who has developed a number of
 20k+ line python projects over the past four years]?



> >>Not exactly.  At the Linux Level, there aren't any extra Xen system calls.
> >>Most commands are issued to Xen by performing ioctls on the
> >>/proc/xen/privcmd file.
> >
> >GREAT.
> >
> >that means that it will be possible to lock down at the very least the
> >access to /proc/xen and later, should it prove worthwhile, to protect
> >each ioctl with a new selinux security id per ioctl command.
> 
> Right now, only root (actually, probably users with the CAP_SYSADMIN 
> capability or similar) can do operations on /proc/xen.  

 [which, please excuse me for saying so, doesn't exactly help if that
 root-only interface is then exposed via an open high port number!! :) ]

> Also, many Xen 
> operations are mapped onto one ioctl call so as it is you can't do very 
> fine grained protection based on ioctl number.  

 i was thinking of adding in an LSM hook function that received the
 ioctl number as one of its arguments, translated that in a case
 statement into the corresponding selinux SIDs, and from there checked
 an selinux permission - in a similar way that security/selinux/hooks.c's
 selinux_file_ioctl() or the selinux_file_fcntl() function operates.

 i.e. not using file_has_perm() but task_has_perm() instead.

 then the first thing that the xen ioctl function does is call that LSM
 hook function.

 it would therefore also be possible for someone else to write a
 corresponding LSM linux capabilities function call, too.  should
 someone so wish.

 l.

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