Security Issues
Security is an increasingly important concern in modern times. We will discuss security-related issues as they come up. There are a few general concepts, however, that are worth mentioning now.
Security has two faces, which can be called deliberate and incidental. One security problem is the damage a user can cause through the misuse of existing programs, or by incidentally exploiting bugs; a different issue is what kind of (mis)functionality a programmer can deliberately implement. The programmer has, obviously, much more power than a plain user. In other words, it’s as dangerous to run a program you got from somebody else from the root account as it is to give him or her a root shell now and then. Although having access to a compiler is not a security hole perse, the hole can appear when compiled code is actually executed; everyone should be careful with modules, because a kernel module can do anything. A module is just as powerful as a superuser shell.
Any security check in the system is enforced by kernel code. If the kernel has security holes, then the system has holes. In the official kernel distribution, only an authorized user can load modules; the system call create_module checks if the invoking process is authorized to load a module into the kernel. Thus, when running an official kernel, only the superuser, * or an intruder who has succeeded in becoming privileged, can exploit the power of privileged code.
When possible, driver writers should avoid encoding security policy in their code. Security is a policy issue that is often best handled at higher levels within the kernel, under the control of the system administrator. There are always exceptions, however. As a device driver writer, you should be aware of situations in which some types of device access could adversely affect the system as a whole, and should provide adequate controls. For example, device operations that affect global resources (such as setting an interrupt line) or that could affect other users (such as setting a default block size on a tape drive) are usually only available to sufficiently privileged users, and this check must be made in the driver itself.
Driver writers must also be careful, of course, to avoid introducing security bugs. The C programming language makes it easy to make several types of errors. Many current security problems are created, for example, by buffer overrun errors, in which the programmer forgets to check how much data is written to a buffer, and data ends up written beyond the end of the buffer, thus overwriting unrelated data. Such errors can compromise the entire system and must be avoided. Fortunately, avoiding these errors is usually relatively easy in the device driver context, in which the interface to the user is narrowly defined and highly controlled.
Some other general security ideas are worth keeping in mind. Any input received from user processes should be treated with great suspicion; never trust it unless you can verify it. Be careful with uninitialized memory; any memory obtained fr om the kernel should be zeroed or otherwise initialized before being made available to a user process or device. Otherwise, information leakage could result. If your device interprets data sent to it, be sure the user cannot send anything that could compromise the system. Finally, think about the possible effect of device operations; if there are specific operations (e.g., reloading the firmware on an adapter board, formatting a disk) that could affect the system, those operations should probably be restricted to privileged users.
Be careful, also, when receiving software from third parties, especially when the kernel is concerned: because everybody has access to the source code, everybody can break and recompile things. Although you can usually trust precompiled kernels found in your distribution, you should avoid running kernels compiled by anuntrusted friend—if you wouldn’t run a precompiled binary as root, then you’d better not run a precompiled kernel. For example, a maliciously modified kernel could allow anyone to load a module, thus opening an unexpected back door via create_module.
Note that the Linux kernel can be compiled to have no module support whatsoever, thus closing any related security holes. In this case, of course, all needed drivers must be built directly into the kernel itself. It is also possible, with 2.2 and later kernels, to disable the loading of kernel modules after system boot, via the capability mechanism.
