TrustedBSD Mandatory Access Control (MAC) Framework

Perforce: //depot/projects/trustedbsd/mac/... Collection: p4-cvs-trustedbsd-mac

Mandatory access controls extend discretionary access controls by allowing administrators to enforce additional security for all subjects (e.g. processes or sockets) and objects (e.g. sockets, file system objects, sysctl nodes) in the system. Development of those new access control models is facilitated by the development of a flexible kernel access control extension framework, the TrustedBSD MAC Framework. This permits new access control models to be introduced as kernel modules.

Currently, modules exist that implement MLS (Multi-Level Security), a fixed-label Biba integrity policy, Type Enforcement, and several other security policies that reflect common requirements of typical FreeBSD deployment environments, such as mandatory limits on inter-user visibility in multi-user environments. The current implementation of Low-Watermark MAC (LOMAC) will also be ported to use the module framework. In addition, the DARPA-funded Network Associates Laboratories' CBOSS Project is porting the NSA FLASK/SELinux implementation (SEBSD) to run as an extension model over the TrustedBSD MAC Framework. More information on the SEBSD module may be found on the SEBSD page.

This work is primarily occuring in a TrustedBSD Perforce branch, but much of the framework has been merged to the main FreeBSD development tree and was included in FreeBSD 5.0 and forwards. The current implementation is appropriate for experimental or limited production use; both internal and exposed MAC APIs will not be frozen until 5.2-RELEASE. All policy modules with the exception of the SEBSD implementation have been merged into the FreeBSD tree at this point.

Work has also recently begun on an experimental port of the TrustedBSD MAC Framework from FreeBSD to Apple's Darwin operating system. Information on this port may be found on the SEDarwin page.