[lug] Steganography (was: newbie question - rc.sysinit)

[rm at mamma.varadinet.de]

On Sat, Jul 14, 2001 at 12:50:12PM -0600, Chris Riddoch wrote:
[...]
> > There actually are good reasons for having this feature (at least for
> > high availability servers).
> 
> I suppose there could be, now that you mention high availability.  I
> hadn't thought of that.  I don't know which architecture it is that
> lets you do it, but something lets you hot-swap CPUs and run different
> OSes on different kernels - something of IBMs, I think.  I suppose, on
> those archiectures, that you'd want to be able to load a kernel onto
> that CPU without rebooting the whole system.

IBM 390 is one of them.

> > Yup. A really nasty cracker could actually replace the bios ith Linux!
> > (given that the hardware is supported by the Linux Bios Project ;-)
> 
> Oooo! I've never seen this project before! That looks really cool!
> I'm tempted to try it out, but the idea of hosing my BIOS from a bug
> or corrupted install isn't very appealing.

Come on, a little bit of risk here can't hurt ;-)
Well, we happen to have a flash burner here, so restoring a bios isn't that
hard. But booting up Linux in a few seconds is truely impressive.

> > > And here's my proposal: have a look at the "capabilities" attribute in
> > > the kernel.  It's rather Un-Unix-like, 
> > 
> > really? I thought BSD supports  capabilities since quite a while (same
> > with AIX if memory serves me right).
> 
> So it does.  I didn't realize this was as common as I just discovered...

Well, even the Linux kernel does support it since quite a while. The problem
seems to be the userspace programs to take advantage of it. And, as allways,
one hase to meassure the increased security with the higher complexity of
administration.

  Ralf