On Mon, May 08, 2006 at 01:21:58PM -0700, Erik Nordmark wrote:
> Peter Memishian wrote:
> 
> >We're not sure -- we've asked for Casper's thoughts on
> >PRIV_NET_OBSERVABILITY as a whole, but he's on vacation at the moment.
> 
> Isn't "observability" a bit too broad here? I would assume observability 
> includes packet counters (e.g., netstat -i) in addition to being able to 
> look at the packet content.

Looking at counters does not typically require privilege, but maybe it
should require some basic privilege, as counters might leak useful data.

> I suspect for snoop-type activity we might over time need a range of 
> visibility, just as I suspect we'll need a set of privileges around 
> being able to send different degrees of raw packets.

Well, if you mean ICMP ECHO REQUEST/REPLY, having a syscall (socket?)
interface to do that would save us the bother with privileges for
distinguishing those types of packets from other uses of raw networking,
no?

> One way of approaching this is to define a small set of "raw" privileges 
> that can separately capture being able to observe/receive and being able 
> to transmit.

Sending and receiving are different things.  And for loopback, does
anyone ever want to be able to send packets using a rawip socket?  Why?
Because of missing non-raw interfaces or for fault injection?

Anyways, for me the bottom line is: someday have two privileges for
snooping, one for loopback and one for non-loopback.  It's hardly an
urgent matter, but getting this right now may save privilege-splitting
headaches later.

Nico
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