Pluggable Security

“‘I think the decision to merge Smack is something that needs to
be considered in the wider context of overall security
architecture,’ suggested James Morris following Andrew Morton’s
recent comment that he plans to merge the functionality in the
upcoming 2.6.24 kernel. While James had no complaints about Smack
itself, he expressed concerns regarding the pluggable nature of
LSM, which is used by Smack, cautioning, ‘if LSM remains, security
will never be a first class citizen of the kernel,’ adding, ‘on a
broader scale, we’ll miss the potential of Linux having a coherent,
semantically strong security architecture.’ He noted that he’d
rather see SELinux as the sole Linux security framework, ‘merging
Smack, however, would lock the kernel into the LSM API. Presently,
as SELinux is the only in-tree user, LSM can still be
removed…'”

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