LOMAC -- Low-Watermark Mandatory Access Control security facility
kldload lomac
The LOMAC module provides a drop-in security mechanism in addition to the
traditional POSIX UID-based security facilities, requiring no additional
configuration from the administrator. LOMAC aims to be two things: it is
non-intrusive, so that the system with LOMAC will not feel largely different
from the system without it, and will not require much modification
to initialize; it is also comprehensive enough that a majority of attacks
to compromise a system should fail.
To this end, each process on the system will have a label of several
attributes, including a ``high'' or ``low'' security level, attached to
it, and these labels of integrity will be managed with a system cognizant
of IPC (signals, debugging, sockets, pipes), path-based file system
labels, virtual memory objects, and privileged system calls. A process
(or set of vmspace-sharing processes) will initially inherit the
integrity level of its parent, which, at the point of LOMAC being started
with kldload(8), will be high. If it reads lower-integrity data from one
of the controlled mechanisms, it will then decrease its integrity level,
and access to modify higher-integrity data will be revoked.
LOMAC on FreeBSD, as implemented currently, should properly respect all
aspects of any chroot(8) or jail(8) operation performed after it has been
initialized. Pre-existing jail or chroot environments may not necessarily
work completely. LOMAC's file system should correctly respect the
caching behavior of any of the system's file systems, and so work for any
``normal'' or ``synthetic'' file systems. After loaded, another root
mount(8) will exist on the system and appear as type ``lomacfs''.
See /sys/security/lomac/policy_plm.h for specific information on exactly
how LOMAC has been compiled to control access to the file system.
Some programs, for example syslogd(8), may need to be restarted after
LOMAC is initialized for them to continue proper operation. This version
of LOMAC has not had widespread testing, so some common programs have
probably not been tested and could have issues that need to be worked
around or fixed.
kldload(8)
LOMAC was initially implemented for Linux systems over the past several
years. Since then, this implementation was created via funding from the
United States DARPA. See the copyright for details.
Brian Fundakowski Feldman <[email protected]>
Timothy Fraser <[email protected]>
LOMAC has not gone through widespread testing yet, so many problems may
still exist. There is still yet one unfixed panic which is reproduceable
under load (vrele(9) being called too many times). The operation of
mount(2) and unmount(2) may not work properly or at all once LOMAC has
been loaded. After being loaded, the system must be restarted to revert
to a state without LOMAC.
FreeBSD 5.2.1 November 20, 2001 FreeBSD 5.2.1 [ Back ] |
