[e-lang] E + MinorFs + AppArmor: adding Tahoe to the stack ?

[Rob Meijer]

On Thu, January 28, 2010 20:02, Raoul Duke wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 4:58 AM, Rob Meijer <capibara at xs4all.nl> wrote:
>> On Tue, January 26, 2010 22:09, David Wagner wrote:
>>> I can't speak for others, but the reason I have not responded is I
>>> have not understood what is the killer benefit MinorFS provides or
>>> what the big win would be for those who buy into it.
>> To sum it up what I would consider the 'killer benefit' would be for
>> E users: 'It has the potential to close the "attack from below" hole for
>> persistent E applications.'
>> ...
>> to MinorFs for pseudo persistent process granularity access to Tahoe
>> based
>> storage could perhaps help to close the gap by providing a second
>> 'killer
>> benefit'.
>
> the question i have is: who really is the audience? my impression is
> that the audience for security is something of a niche. so if you are
> expecting Joe Ubuntu to beat a path to your door, that seems overly
> hopeful. whereas if you are expecting something like the NSA to beat a
> path to your door, well, that might have the possibility of success,
> but also bring along its own issues :-).

My primary audience I guess would be people who want to build
'trustworthy' applications that can run on either Suse or Ubuntu (that is
systems that come with AppArmor). The baseline is that without
AppArmor/MinorFs you can not trust any application running as a particular
user and relying on shared mutable state provided by the $HOME and $TEMP
directories UNLESS you can
trust ALL applications running as that user. AppArmor+MinorFs allow you to
trust a single application running as the same user as some other
completely malicious application that is running at the same time with a
minimum amount of confinement needed for the malware.

This allows people on this list (E developers) to build trustworthy
applications and deploy them on a system where it shares an IBAC
enviroment with malware and still deliver as a trustworthy application.