Re: [Labeled-nfs] [nfsv4] New MAC label support Internet Draft posted to IETF website

[Nicolas Williams <Nicolas.Williams@sun.com>]

On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 12:51:48PM -0400, Stephen Smalley wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-03-27 at 17:09 -0500, Nicolas Williams wrote:
> > On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 09:22:42AM -0400, Stephen Smalley wrote:
> > > On Fri, 2009-03-27 at 08:55 -0400, Stephen Smalley wrote:
> > > > You can't represent Type Enforcement via MLS/BLP; TE is strictly more
> > > > expressive than BLP, not the other way around.  It also has no inherent
> > > > notion of dominance; the access matrix is explicitly defined and may
> > > > include intransitive relationships, which are required for integrity
> > > > goals and guaranteed invocation.
> > 
> > I thought that MLS compartment -> DTE type.  Is that not the case?  I
> > realize that DTE does not have an inherent notion of dominance, but for
> > _documents_ (as opposed to operating system- or application-specific
> > files like /etc/shadow) there surely must be a way to establish
> > dominance, no?  That seems important to me.
> 
> No, there just needs to be a way to establish authorization.  The
> internal logic for determining whether data of a given label is allowed
> to transit over a network interface of a given label is policy-specific
> and shouldn't be limited to the dominance relation.  It can just be
> represented as a permission check on a label pair for a given object
> class, and then the security policy logic can internally decide yes/no
> on that permission based on any combination of the dominance relation,
> the TE access matrix, or any other policy constraints.

OK, good -- that's a local-to-end-points consideration, so we can keep
the use of DTE at the end-to-end application layer and CALIPSO at the IP
layer compatible.

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