Subject: Re: [Bug #11500] /proc/net bug related to selinux

From: Andrew Morton <akpm-de/[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:11:43 -0700

On Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:39:45 -0700
ebiederm-aS9lmoZGLiVWk0Htik3J/[email-masked] (Eric W. Biederman) wrote:

> Paul Moore <[email-masked]> writes:
> 
> > We suck?  Maybe, but some explanation about why we suck in this 
> > particular case would be helpful as far as I'm concerned.  I don't 
> > really care about identifying the guilty suckees, I'm more interested 
> > in finding out what happened to cause us to suck because of this.
> 
> Agreed.  I believe we carefully gave selinux the same paths for /proc/net
> that it had before so I don't know why this affects user space.
> 
> I know we had some selinux review when we made the change.
> 
> Eric

It's back up-thread somewhere.  umm...

On Mon, 15 Sep 2008 09:05:26 -0400
Stephen Smalley <[email-masked]> wrote:

> However, the most likely explanation is simply that when /proc/net was
> changed from being a directory to being a symlink to /proc/self/net,
> that introduced an additional permission check on accesses
> of /proc/net/<whatever>, namely the read check on the symlink itself.
> And since that check wasn't happening on /proc/net accesses with older
> kernels, older policies didn't allow it.