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Some distro (Mandrake? Debian? This was a while ago) had a bad default SELinux setup for years that introduced a subtle vulnerability that wasn't there in boxes
by bandrami 10y ago
Some distro (Mandrake? Debian? This was a while ago) had a bad default SELinux setup for years that introduced a subtle vulnerability that wasn't there in boxes that had SELinux disabled.
Knobs that can be tweaked can be tweaked wrong, and wrongly-tweaked knobs are security problems. Frankly I don't even like ACLs and capabilities for that exact reason: it's no longer immediately obvious what the actual permissions in a situation are ("let's see, the daemon is running in an unprivileged account, but it has CAP_SYS_ADMIN set, and this file is inheriting its ACLs from the parent dir..."). Making it more difficult to reason about security is generally a Bad Thing, and not worth whatever features that difficulty brings with it.
- bkor 10y agoPractically there's been many examples where SELinux restricted a security vulnerability. I think SELinux is way too complicated. Needing to know exact commands to turn error messages into something understandable is bizarre. That said, SELinux determines what is allowed. Having it introduce an additional vulnerability/permission just due to configuration is really odd. I tried searching for your example, but can only find security bugs, not configuration issues.
- bandrami 10y agoTurns out I was thinking PAX/Grsecurity back in 2005. Same principle, though: more knobs to turn = more knobs to turn wrong.