"OpenSolaris has launched a new project, Flexible Mandatory Access Control, to integrate the Flask/TE security scheme into their OS. This is the same underlying model implemented by SELinux, and follows other cross-platform Flask/TE integration projects such as SEDarwin and SEBSD. This is very exciting in terms of establishing compatible security across operating systems, particularly for Mandatory Access Control, which has traditionally been narrowly focused and generally incompatible. With FMAC, we're closer to seeing truly ubiquitous, cross-platform MAC security."
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like what? any technical faults?
The only bad things about SElinux I hear are due to difficulty in rule building which although isn't meant for a joe desktop user the new building tools should be easy enough for a system admin to learn.
Mainly im trying to see what advantages this has over the current system.
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Well, the 12% (on x86 for reads) to 147% (on SH series processors for writes, and no that's not a typo) cpu overhead of SELinux is rather significant. (And that impacts heat dissipation and battery life as well, of course.) Not sure how this new OpenSolaris implementation will compare. I think the overhead is supposed to be somewhat lower in Linux kernel 2.6.24. We'll see, I guess.
My understanding is that one pays a performance overhead even with selinux "disabled", unless he manually adds "selinux=0" to the kernel boot params AND the option for SELinux to honor that boot param has been compiled in.
Edited 2008-03-05 13:58 UTC
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woh thanks i had never heard that but i'll take your word for it. that is a pretty bad performance hit. Personally i'll still deal with it cause i want some security infrastructure to get adopted. Open source has way, way too many programs on a machine. I mean look at debians repo's you got 20,000 different applications. That is ALOT of security bugs waiting to be found or already found and being exploited. There needs to be a wrapper in the middle to protect the machine from poor code. Weather it be Selinux or another type of MAC system, or stack protection I dont know or care, but there needs to be something between poor code and free reign of a machine. for now SElinux appears to be the one with the most active development and adoption.
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Any idea why the cost is so high?
On Windows, we do the expensive security check when you open a handle (aka fd) and you are granted tbe desired rights until you close the handle. There is a cost when using handles of checking that the handle has been given the right needed for each operation, but it's a single AND and a comparison that happens in the handle table lookup codepath.
What does SELinux do that is more expensive?
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That's a too unbalanced statement. 12% overhead on what? As far as I know, the overhead is on certain system calls. Most CPU-intensive applications will relatively only spend very little time in system calls. So, overall, the impact is not that much, while it does give much more security. Seems like a fair trade-off to me.
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It is a port of SELinux. Specifically a port of the pre-GPL version.
Trusted Solaris has been abandoned for various reasons (it was always way behind Solaris, hard to maintain, etc) and not all Sun customers were happy with trusted extensions.
Edited 2008-03-05 13:26 UTC
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Trusted Solaris has been abandoned for various reasons (it was always way behind Solaris, hard to maintain, etc) and not all Sun customers were happy with trusted extensions.
I don't know where you got your information, but it is wrong.
Contrary to your assertion that Trusted Solaris was abandoned, all of its technology has instead been integrated into the main release. In addition, if you actually take the time to read many discussions on opensolaris.org about the Trusted Extensions it brought, you would see that government customers especially liked them.
So, I assert that your source of information needs review.
Edited 2008-03-05 14:21 UTC
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Contrary to your assertion that Trusted Solaris was abandoned, all of its technology has instead been integrated into the main release. In addition, if you actually take the time to read many discussions on opensolaris.org about the Trusted Extensions it brought, you would see that government customers especially liked them.
So, I assert that your source of information needs review.
Right, So Trusted Solaris technology hasn't been integrated into the main release. One of the main things that was dropped from Trusted Solaris is fine grained labeling (which some Sun people claim is unnecessary). Trusted Extensions simply does not do the same thing that Trusted Solaris did. I have personal knowledge of ex-Sun customers that found Trusted Extensions inadequate for their uses.
Granted many components of Trusted Solaris has been brought into Trusted Extensions (e.g., trusted X, labeled networking, etc). I may have been a little harsh by saying 'abandoned' and for that I apologize.
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Contrary to your assertion that Trusted Solaris was abandoned, all of its technology has instead been integrated into the main release. In addition, if you actually take the time to read many discussions on opensolaris.org about the Trusted Extensions it brought, you would see that government customers especially liked them.
So, I assert that your source of information needs review.
Right, So Trusted Solaris technology hasn't been integrated into the main release. "
No, technology from Trusted Solaris has been integrated into the main release. Maybe not the GA release yet (though I thought it was) though.
Regardless of personal knowledge of such things, it's hardly news that some folks find certain technology inadequate for their uses. Some people like things, some don't. Some people have their needs met, some don't.
Just as many people find SELinux inadequate for their needs. I certainly do. I absolutely despise SELinux and believe it to be the worst thing ever. Maybe the concept is great, but the implementation in most GNU/Linux distributions is horrid and unusable.
That was my main point. Sun engineers took the "best of breed" technology from Trusted Solaris and integrated it. Trusted Solaris, to the engineers, was really just Solaris + Trusted Extensions from what I've been told.
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The Trusted Solaris extensions got integrated into Solaris with Solaris 10 Update 3.
I know this well because I had to fix the Solaris OpenAFS client driver because it directly molested a cred_t and the TS integration changed the size of that Private struct, and that broke binary compatibility in OpenAFS driver. ddi_cred(9F) to the rescue... that's what OpenAFS should have used in the first place.
Yes, Method needs to get his/her sources straight. Binarycrusader is correct. "Trusted Solaris" ceased being a separate product and its functionality was folded into Solaris 10 proper. This is why you don't see a "Trusted Solaris 10" product... because it is Solaris 10.
Edited 2008-03-07 01:25 UTC
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