FYI on TrustedBSD documentation updates, other news

[Robert Watson]

In preparation for the DISCEX III presentation on Tuesday, I've been
updating the online documentation for the TrustedBSD MAC Framework.  In
doing so, I have...

(1) Added our USENIX/FREENIX 2003 paper on the MAC Framework to the
    TrustedBSD documentation web page.  It includes discussion and
    analysis of the approach and rationale, as well as some performance
    measurements, etc.  Look for:

	The TrustedBSD MAC Framework: Extensible Kernel Access Control for
	FreeBSD 5.0

(2) Updated the MAC Framework developer documentation in the FreeBSD
    Developer's Handbook.  It now includes more information about the
    kernel and user architecture, some updates to the entry point list,
    new information on labeling and policies, etc.  The document is linked
    off the TrustedBSD documentation page, or you can reach it directly:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/developers-handbook/mac.html

(3) Updated the MAC man pages, adding mac.conf.5, updating summaries, etc.
    The man pages found on the FreeBSD web site haven't been updated
    recently, but new FreeBSD installs from the 5.x branch should pick up
    the changes. 

The web-based and online documentation continues to be a work in progress,
but should now be quite a bit more useful.  We'll continue to update it as
we keep making progress. :-) 

In other news, FreeBSD 5.1 will ship with UFS2 as the default file system,
which will ease access to ACLs and MAC labeling in the default install. 
We're also made a number of changes to improve the performance and
handling of Mbuf labels, added a mac_portacl policy module, and quite a
bit more.

High on the TODO list are:

- Modify labeled security modules to use a centralized label list rather
  than allocating per-label instance storage, which should improve
  performance and lower memory overhead for running the modules.

- Figure out how to merge the SEBSD-derived label and policy configuration
  management into the main MAC tree from our SEBSD tree: FLASK relies on
  exec-time atomic label changes on processes, rather than the
  mac_set_proc() model which is used by the other policies.  Likewise,
  FLASK stores its notion of possible user labels and transitions in the
  kernel, whereas our other policies store user label information in the
  login class database. 

- Move to a label database separate from the login class database to
  improve flexibility.

- Revisit out handling of TTY labels as set at login, our current approach
  has a number of serious limitations.

- Add variant symlink support to handle poly-instantiation handling of
  /tmp, et al.

- Perform more real-world testing of various MAC models to make sure we've
  caught all the edge cases, improve our initial labeling of file system
  objects, etc.  Improve user documentation to handle results. 

- Improve networking integration for carrying labels over the network,
  IPsec support, etc.

Thanks,

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert at fledge.watson.org      Network Associates Laboratories


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