Security testing: need for a security policy, and a security-critical package process

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2009-11-24 at 13:28 -0500, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> > >I don't want to ship a desktop that doesn't let the user do useful
> > >things.
> > 
> > And you can ship a desktop SPIN that way. But the base pkgs should
> > not install with an insecure set of choices.
> > 
> > if you want the spin to have a post-scriptlet which allows more
> > things, then that's the choice of the desktop sig over the desktop
> > spin.
> 
> Given how .pkla works, this is likely to be done with packages, not
> with %post hackery. (Which should make it much easier to reliably
> test, as well.)

As I noted somewhat flippantly in another thread, this comes with the
problem that, theoretically, a user who has the privileges to install
packages at a relaxed security level could arbitrarily raise the
security level of the system to a much higher level, against the wishes
of the administrator.

perhaps something akin to system-config-selinux would be needed to guard
against this? I'm not sure how it could work in the PolicyKit framework,
though.

-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
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