[PATCH 2/3] security: add symbol namespace for reading file data

[Greg KH]

On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 04:16:22PM +0000, Luis Chamberlain wrote:
> On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 10:40:31AM -0500, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> > Luis Chamberlain <mcgrof at kernel.org> writes:
> > 
> > > Certain symbols are not meant to be used by everybody, the security
> > > helpers for reading files directly is one such case. Use a symbol
> > > namespace for them.
> > >
> > > This will prevent abuse of use of these symbols in places they were
> > > not inteded to be used, and provides an easy way to audit where these
> > > types of operations happen as a whole.
> > 
> > Why not just remove the ability for the firmware loader to be a module?
> > 
> > Is there some important use case that requires the firmware loader
> > to be a module?
> > 
> > We already compile the code in by default.  So it is probably just
> > easier to remove the modular support all together.  Which would allow
> > the export of the security hooks to be removed as well.
> 
> Yeah, that's a better solution. The only constaint I am aware of is
> we *cannot* change the name of the module from firmware_class since the
> old fallback sysfs loader depends on the module name. So, so long as we
> take care with that on built-in and document this very well, I think
> we should be good.
> 
> I checked the commit logs and this was tristate since the code was added
> upstream, so I cannot see any good reason it was enabled as modular.
> 
> Speaking with a *backports experience* hat on, we did have a use case
> to use a module for it in case a new feature was added upstream which
> was not present on older kernels. However I think that using a separate
> symbol prefix would help with that.
> 
> Would any Android stakeholders / small / embedded folks whave any issue
> with this?

Android has build in the firmware loading logic for a while now.  Well,
always, they have not had kernel modules for many years.  That is
changing but this logic is not getting moved to a kernel module as that
would just be silly :)

thanks,

greg k-h