Linux Security Summit 2012/Abstracts/Reshetova

Title

Bootstrapping the Policies for LSMs for Native and Web Applications

Presenter

Elena Reshetova, Intel

Abstract

Having a good LSM enabled in your kernel is only beginning of a long way towards getting your system secure. What usually takes most of the time and skill is placing a proper security policy and keeping it updated. Security policies for mobile devices are usually configured and managed remotely, which means that they should be coming as part of the application package and handled by the installer.

Rpm is a default package manager in many operating systems, including Tizen OS. It already has integrated support for SELinux policies, but lacks the unified interface for all existing LSMs, such as Smack, Tomoyo and etc. The talk will demonstrate the set of security hooks that are proposed for upstream RPM that should be generic enough to satisfy the needs of each LSM and allow implementing functionality of each LSM in a separate rpm plug-in without any changes needed to rpm itself. The proof of concept implementation of such plug-in [1] and examples of package policy (manifest) is given for Smack LSM that has been integrated to Tizen OS [2].

In addition the talk will touch the question of creating policies for web applications and challenge of keeping both native and web application policies in sync.

References:

[1] Rpm security hooks and code of the MSM plug-in, https://github.com/ereshetova/rpm/tree/security-changes

[2] MSM plug-in wiki, https://github.com/ereshetova/rpm/wiki