SGX vs LSM (Re: [PATCH v20 00/28] Intel SGX1 support)

[Linus Torvalds]

On Fri, May 17, 2019 at 10:55 AM Sean Christopherson
<sean.j.christopherson at intel.com> wrote:
>
> In this snippet, IS_PRIVATE() is true for anon inodes, false for
> /dev/sgx/enclave.  Because EPC memory is always shared, SELinux will never
> check PROCESS__EXECMEM for mprotect() on/dev/sgx/enclave.

Why _does_ the memory have to be shared? Shared mmap() is
fundamentally less secure than private mmap, since by definition it
means "oh, somebody else has access to it too and might modify it
under us".

Why does the SGX logic care about things like that? Normal executables
are just private mappings of an underlying file, I'm not sure why the
SGX interface has to have that shared thing, and why the interface has
to have a device node in the first place when  you have system calls
for setup anyway.

So why don't the system calls just work on perfectly normal anonymous
mmap's? Why a device node, and why must it be shared to begin with?

                  Linus