[nycbug-talk] kernels

[Bob Ippolito]

On Jun 3, 2004, at 5:34 PM, Roland C. Dowdeswell wrote:

> On 1086295432 seconds since the Beginning of the UNIX epoch
> Bob Ippolito wrote:
>>
>
>> The security argument is kind of silly, because if that really was a
>> concern you could add a sysctl that lets you turn module loading off
>> (forever) at runtime.  So you boot up, load your modules, and turn
>> module loading off.  In practice, nobody really does this (as far as I
>> know) because only root can load kernel modules and root can do
>> whatever he wants anyway, whether or not the kernel is split into 1 or
>> 1000 pieces.
>
> There are things that you do not want to allow even root to do
> without dropping into single user mode on the console.  And you
> have to disable LKM loading in order to get there.  E.g. on NetBSD
> in secure level > 0, root cannot grovel the PCI bus and directly
> access hardware, write to immutable files, etc.

Sure, but that is completely orthogonal to *having* LKM.  It's very 
easy to have a kill-switch sysctl that turns it off until the next 
reboot.

-bob
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