May 26, 2009, 1:22 pm
Dan Walsh and Eric Paris have been working on an SELinux “sandbox” which Walsh describes on his weblog. The basic idea is to use SELinux to restrict the kinds of actions a user application can perform. This would allow users to run untrusted programs or handle untrusted input in a more secure manner. “The discussions brought up an old Bug report of [mine] about writing policy for the ‘little things’. SELinux does a great job of confining System Services, but what about applications executed by users. The bug report talked about confining grep, awk, ls … The idea was couldn’t we stop the grep or the mv command from suddenly opening up a network connection and copying off my /etc/shadow file to parts unknown.” Paris also posted an introduction to the sandbox on linux-kernel.
