LOMAC: Low Water-Mark Integrity Protection for COTS Environments

  • Authors:
  • Timothy Fraser

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • SP '00 Proceedings of the 2000 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

We hypothesize that a form of kernel-resident access-control-based integrity protection can gain widespread acceptance in Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) environments if it couples some useful protection with a high degree of compatibility with existing software, configurations, and practices. To test this hypothesis, we have developed a highly compatible free open-source prototype called LOMAC, and released it on the Internet. LOMAC is a dynamically loadable extension for COTS Linux kernels that provide integrity protection based on Low Water-Mark access control. We present a classification of existing access control models with regard to compatibility, concluding that models similar to Low Water-Mark are especially well suited to high-compatibility solutions. We also describe our practical strategies for dealing with the pathological cases in the Low Water-Mark model's behavior, which include a small extension of the model, and an unusual application of its concepts.