[RFC] Drop support for old audit rule API

Steve Grubb sgrubb at redhat.com
Tue Jul 28 18:34:10 UTC 2009


Hi,

Another reminder. I have branched the audit svn to have a 1.8 series and the 
development trunk. The below proposal changed the API. So to be sure that any 
programs that could be impacted are found, I have bumped the soname number. 
This will require distributions to recompile everything linked to libaudit. 
So, this is the forward looking audit development and the 1.8 branch will 
still be supported with bugfixes for a while.

At the same time, I have cleaned out the header files in trunk so that a 2.6.29 
kernel or later is required. The development trunk in svn will become the 2.0 
release very soon.

-Steve

On Friday 27 February 2009 10:15:19 am Steve Grubb wrote:
> Another thought for the next major release is to drop support for the old
> audit rules API in libaudit. A long time ago, the function prototypes for:
>
> extern int  audit_request_rules_list(int fd);
> extern int  audit_add_rule(int fd, struct audit_rule *rule,
>                                 int flags, int action);
> extern int  audit_delete_rule(int fd, struct audit_rule *rule,
>                                 int flags, int action);
> extern int  audit_rule_syscall(struct audit_rule *rule, int scall);
> extern int  audit_rule_syscallbyname(struct audit_rule *rule,
>                                 const char *scall);
> extern int  audit_rule_fieldpair(struct audit_rule *rule, const char *pair,
>                                 int flags);
> extern void audit_rule_free(struct audit_rule *rule);
>
> Were moved to a private internal header. This was to encourage any external
> apps from using them, but if they had been previously compiled to know
> about the API, they would still be able to link and run.
>
> As far as I know, auditctl & autrace are the only apps that would be
> affected. There very well may be some 3rd party apps I don't know about
> that this could impact. Hopefully they are on this list or moved their
> function calls when the prototype disappeared.
>
> The proposal is to drop the above mentioned functions and bump the soname
> number so that anything linking against libaudit has to be recompiled to
> make sure they have no old function calls. At some point in the future, we
> can also remove the kernel's support for the old rule format.
>
> Let's discuss....
>
> -Steve
>
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