Simplicity is a form of art...

Scale is a cloud threat

Not that long ago, a vulnerability was found in Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB, a NoSQL SaaS database within the Microsoft Azure cloud. The vulnerability, which is dubbed ChaosDB by the Wiz Research Team, uses a vulnerability or misconfiguration in the Jupyter Notebook feature within Cosmos DB. This vulnerability allowed an attacker to gain access to other's Cosmos DB credentials. Not long thereafter, a second vulnerability dubbed OMIGOD showed that cloud security is not as simple as some vendors like you to believe.

These vulnerabilities are a good example of how scale is a cloud threat. Companies that do not have enough experience with public cloud might not assume this in their threat models.

We do not ship SELinux sandbox

A few days ago a vulnerability was reported in the SELinux sandbox user space utility. The utility is part of the policycoreutils package. Luckily, Gentoo's sys-apps/policycoreutils package is not vulnerable - and not because we were clairvoyant about this issue, but because we don't ship this utility.

Why we do confine Firefox

If you're a bit following the SELinux development community you will know Dan Walsh, a Red Hat security engineer. Today he blogged about CVE-2015-4495 and SELinux, or why doesn't SELinux confine Firefox. He should've asked why the reference policy or Red Hat/Fedora policy does not confine Firefox, because SELinux is, as I've mentioned before, not the same as its policy.

In effect, Gentoo's SELinux policy does confine Firefox by default. One of the principles we focus on in Gentoo Hardened is to develop desktop policies in order to reduce exposure and information leakage of user documents. We might not have the manpower to confine all desktop applications, but I do think it is worthwhile to at least attempt to do this, even though what Dan Walsh mentioned is also correct: desktops are notoriously difficult to use a mandatory access control system on.

Dropping sesandbox support

A vulnerability in seunshare, part of policycoreutils, came to light recently (through bug 509896). The issue is within libcap-ng actually, but the specific situation in which the vulnerability can be exploited is only available in seunshare.

Now, seunshare is not built by default on Gentoo. You need to define USE …

Looking at the local Linux kernel privilege escalation

There has been a few posts already on the local Linux kernel privilege escalation, which has received the CVE-2013-2094 ID. arstechnica has a write-up with links to good resources on the Internet, but I definitely want to point readers to the explanation that Brad Spengler made on the vulnerability.

In …

What could SELinux have done to mitigate the postgresql vulnerability?

Gentoo is one of the various distributions which supports SELinux as a Mandatory Access Control system to, amongst other things, mitigate the results of a succesfull exploit against software. So what about the recent PostgreSQL vulnerability?

When correctly configured, the PostgreSQL daemon will run in the postgresql_t domain. In …