gnoack

I'd also be interested in this, particularly in the "move" case, which requires no privileges and can also happen without the kernel being in the loop (e.g. on a different machine, in NFS).

If your calculated policy is a function of the entire path, you'd normally need to key the calculated policy by the entire path and its relevant properties (underlying inodes) as well, no?

There are path-based LSMs in the Linux kernel that do not employ such caching. If you found a solution for this which also works in the corner cases and results in speed-up in real life scenarios, I'd be interested :)

When project leads and directors only ask for features, the humans start to eventually push back, but agents do as you please, no matter what the cost.

They were trained to do what you ask, but unlike with humans, you need to ask for the refactoring yourself. -- They won't necessarily come up with it on their own.

(They also tend to not be around for long enough to live through the consequences of their tech debt actions.)

Point taken, that's true. I'm admittedly developing on distributions where the updates are faster, so I missed that. But then again, I also didn't expect that this short weblog article would have such a large audience when I wrote it. :)

Yes, "en-bugging" :)

+1

It is also a testament to solid engineering and attention to good security practices in general. These still work, also against fancy new AI attackers.

When sophisticated attacks become cheaper to run, maybe it will (finally) be cheaper to do more solid engineering instead of doing it quick and dirty and ending up in indefinite bug-squashing mode.

How does this change the point that is being made in the article? Your agent is also only taking one of the existing roles that humans today occupy (e.g. the software operator or developer)

I think you are misrepresenting this;

Varlink is based on much more conventional UNIX technology than Dbus, which is decades old: You connect to a named UNIX socket through its socket file in the filesystem (man page: unix(7)).

This is an old mechanism and it is known to work well. It does not require a broker service, it works right at system startup, and it does not require a working user database for permission checks (which would be a circular dependency for systemd in some configurations). If at all, I am surprised that systemd didn't use that earlier.

The main thing that Varlink standardizes on top of that is a JSON-based serialization format for a series of request/response pairs. But that seems like a lightweight addition.

It also does not require kernel support to work, the kernel support is already there. He mentioned in the talk that he'd like to be able to "tag" UNIX sockets that speak varlink as such, with kernel support. But that is not a prerequisite to use this at all. The service discovery -- and he said that in the talk as well -- is simply done by listing socket files in the file system, and by having a convention for where they are created.

Etoile had its own Smalltalk dialect back in the day, Pragmatic Smalltalk. This was a Smalltalk based on the Objective-C runtime, based on an OMeta implementation and a LLVM backend. David Chisnall, who created it at the time, ended up getting involved more in LLVM in the long run, I believe.

Landlock is currently still lacking some wrapper libraries that make it easier to use, in C.

We do have libraries for Go and Rust, and the invocation is much more terse there, e.g.

  err := landlock.V5.BestEffort().RestrictPaths(
      landlock.RODirs("/usr", "/bin"),
      landlock.RWDirs("/tmp"),
  )

FWIW, the additional ceremony in Linux is because Linux guarantees full ABI backwards compatibility (whereas in OpenBSD policy, compiled programs may need recompilation occasionally).

Similarly terse APIs as for Go and Rust are possible in C as well though, as wrapper libraries.

For full disclosure, I am the author of the go-landlock library and contributor to Landlock in the kernel.

The way I interpreted most of these "subclassing" cases in the GoF diagrams was actually as "subtyping", and then it makes more sense.

Regarding no one having a lock on the term "delegation", I think this is spot on. Yes, someone might have used the term differently before GoF, but that does not mean that GoF was wrong. It just meant something else in their context.

(Btw, congratulations, your comment is the first one so far in this comment thread that actually discusses the linked article and not just the GoF book itself.)