Re: In-kernel Authentication Tokens (PAGs)

[Kyle Moffett <mrmacman_g4@mac.com>]

On Jun 15, 2004, at 18:07, Chris Wright wrote:
> * Kyle Moffett (mrmacman_g4@mac.com) wrote:
>> One thing that I would very much like to have is the ability to create
>> a new
>> shell with a new keyring, such that I can still see and use the old
>> keyring,
>> but I can create new keys without modifying the old keyring, even to 
>> the
>> extent of masking out keys in the old keyring without modifying them 
>> for
>> other processes.  From my brief glance at your patch, that's not a
>> feature you have implemented.
> Sounds like a CLONE_KEYRING flag?

I think the two concepts are unrelated.  You should not be required
to create a new thread/process/task in order to give yourself a
separate key-ring, and it would be plain stupid to have one mode
of the clone() syscall that doesn't create a new task but instead
changes key-rings  Take Apache and suexec PHP  for example: it
would be very useful to be able to have a key-ring owned by the
root user  that contains the AFS keys Apache uses to access files.
Then when it runs a suexec PHP script, it adds a new key-ring
owned by "someuser" to the process (without doing a clone()).
It does a seteuid("someuser"), then proceeds with the PHP code.
That gives the user's PHP its own key-ring context, and protects
the parent's key-ring.  When done it removes "someuser"'s keys
and does seteuid(0).

Cheers,
Kyle Moffett