Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (2803 mails)

[Jim Henderson <hendersj@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 09 Jul 2008 22:39:48 +0200, Anders Johansson wrote:

> On Wednesday 09 July 2008 20:57:29 Jim Henderson wrote:
> > Because just like Antivirus on Linux, the only thing that AppArmor is
> > doing is preventing a user-initiated program from making changes to the
> > system; changes that wouldn't happen if the user were being smart.
>
> AppArmor primarily exists to protect servers. It has nothing whatever in
> common with anti-virus programs.

Sure it does - both have the job of protecting the system from harm 
caused by malicious code.  They use different methods - and I fully agree 
that AppArmor does a *better* job because it defines behaviours rather 
than specific code signatures.

If I could use AppArmor to protect my *documents* from being changed 
without my knowledge, that'd be great.  That'd solve the problem entirely.

> Servers generally don't need user input to do something, they wouldn't
> scale very well if they did - this is why they need extra protection.

So we just continue with assuming that all Linux users are smart enough 
to not do something stupid to their system?

> If apache required the sysadmin to confirm each and every GET or POST,
> then we would never have any issue with defacements, and apparmor would
> not be needed, you are correct

That's exactly my point.  If "we" require users to confirm every single 
file open/read/write operation is happening in accordance with expected 
behaviours of a program, then we make the user less efficient.

With the power of todays machines, is even a 5% performance hit even 
worth worrying about in *most* applications?

Jim
-- 
 Jim Henderson
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