New "scallhook" feature. Is is OK to create a proposal?

[Robert Watson]

On Tue, 6 Apr 2010, Alexander Churanov wrote:

> My friend, Vladislav Soldatov, and I are going to propose and implement a 
> new "scallhook" feature: the generic modular solution to monitoring, 
> filtering and translating system calls.
>
> The feature differs from OpenBSD systrace: it is much more general, going to 
> be modular and have strong foundation for security application.

Hi Alexander--

This sounds like an interesting project.  Could you say a bit more about how 
you envision such a system working, and in particular, how it might address 
concerns about the safety of the approach for some of the purposes you 
describe -- specifically, sandboxing.  On the whole, OS vendors have eshewed 
the syscall wrapper approach due to its vulnerability to race conditions, and 
that concern would be critical concern in considering adopting any such system 
for FreeBSD.  In fact, the MAC Framework, FreeBSD's extensible kernel security 
framework (now also used in Mac OS X), is specifically designed to avoid these 
sorts of races by offering integrated access to kernel data structures while 
holding appropriate locks.

One of the ideas we have on the proposal ideas list is a path-based policy 
similar to Apple's Seatbelt policy module, offering lightweight sandboxing 
using path-based policy module.  One caveat: our notion of "path" is a bit 
weaker than the abstraction of a path in Mac OS X, so some careful thinking 
woudl need to be done.

Robert

>
> The project includes implementing the kernel-side code, the userland
> configuration utility, some of most required filtering/translating modules
> as well as a new handbook (otherbooks) section on configuration and
> extending, plus articles on the web. The future additions to the project may
> be a system for sandboxing application every time it is started and an
> extension to ports system which would automatically sandbox application when
> it is being installed.
>
> About me:
>
> I am software engineer, currently working in Cisco Systems, specializing in
> C/C++/UNIX. My additional interests are software quality and security. I am
> a port maintainer for devel/boost-* and was participating in extending
> syscons driver, until the project was superseded by syscons rewrite by Ed
> Schouten.
>
> About Vladislav:
> Vladislav is a PhD of computer science, has experience with developing in C
> and C++ for FreeBSD.
>
> Before writing the full proposal on the wiki, I'd like to receive the first
> approval.
>
> What do you think of this?
> Will be the feature accepted?
>
> Alexander Churanov
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