CONFIG_SECURITY_DMESG_RESTRICT

[David Henningsson]

On 2010-11-16 15:49, Kees Cook wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 01:22:19PM +0000, Andy Whitcroft wrote:
>> FYI this new security option just dropped into the kernel, for now I
>> have left it turned off.  I suspect you are in the best position to know
>> if this is something we should be working towards turning on:
>>
>> 	# CONFIG_SECURITY_DMESG_RESTRICT is not set
>
> I'd like to turn this on, but it will take some education since using
> "dmesg" will suddenly turn into "sudo dmesg" in instructions everywhere.
> (Most notably apport, actually.)

For a significant amount of audio bugs, reading dmesg is crucial to be 
able to solve the bug. My guess is that the ratio is the same for other 
types of kernel bugs.
Even if we can ask the user for password (which apport sometimes does 
already), we'll still lose the ability for non-sudo users to report bugs 
with good enough information.

The counterquestion is - how security sensitive information do we have 
in dmesg? Why is it a security problem to have it turned on?

-- 
David Henningsson, Canonical Ltd.
http://launchpad.net/~diwic