New systrace facility in -current

Contributed by jose on 2002-05-28 from the new-guy dept.

Recently, a project to enhance the security mechanisms in OpenBSD was imported into -current. The systrace facility is used to enforce system call policies. This allows for sandboxing of applications and users, giving a fine grained amount of control to the administration.

From the CVS changes list:


List:     openbsd-cvs
Subject:  CVS: cvs.openbsd.org: src
From:     Niels Provos

Date:     2002-05-16 16:16:52

CVSROOT:        /cvs
Module name:    src
Changes by:     provos@cvs.openbsd.org  2002/05/16 10:16:52

Modified files:
        sys/kern       : kern_exit.c kern_fork.c 
        sys/conf       : files 
        sys/sys        : conf.h file.h proc.h 
        sys/arch/i386/i386: conf.c trap.c 
Added files:
        sys/dev        : systrace.c systrace.h 

Log message:
systrace facility, used to enforce and generate policies for system calls
okay deraadt@

With these changes, users of -current can extend the security of the system arbitrarily. This seems almost perfect for a multiuser system, or a bastion host.

(Comments are closed)

Comments

By <font color="#336666"><b>Brilliant Idea. Simply Brilliant.<nt>< () on 2002-05-29 04:50
By Rick Wash () rlw6@po.cwru.edu on 2002-05-30 05:24 mailto:rlw6@po.cwru.edu

Note that this is only the kernel parts of systrace. The userland sources can be found at Neils Provos's systrace site .
By dammit jim I'm a doctor () dammitjimimadoctor@yahoo.com on 2002-05-30 16:09 www.dammitjimimadoctor.com

This is all I get when I try to run it:

systrace: open: /dev/systrace: No such file or directory
systrace: fcntl(O_NONBLOCK): Bad file descriptor
systrace: main:434: intercept failed: Bad file descriptor

Sure enough: I have no /dev/systrace. How does one come by such a device?
By Hettb () htb@subdimension.com on 2002-05-31 19:08 mailto:htb@subdimension.com

OpenBSD is my favorite OS, so I am naturally glad that, after so many years, the developrs have decided to incorporate features which have been in the other BSDs' source trees for a long time.
Personally, I do not need all the latest security mesures and bugfixes, as I use OpenBSD pirmarily as a desktop operating system and for surfing the Web, and therefore it's unlikely I'd have to defend myself against evil system hackers, but seeing that work is actually getting done and that the developers haven't left might give the BSDs' dwindling userbase new hope.
Another thing I am looking forward to is OpenBSD kernel support for KDE 3.0; I'm sure that, if Theo et al could finally get around to implementing this, OpenBSD would easily surpass Linux in popularity.
The furutre looks bright for OpenBSD. ^_^

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