From: Pawel Jakub Dawidek (nickgarage.freebsd.pl)
Date: Thu Mar 20 2003 - 18:58:38 CST

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Good news everyone. After six months of hard work, many hundreds CVS commits
and lots of lost nights we would like to proudly announce, that the CerbNG
project released first generally available version (1.0-RC1) of it's kernel
security module.

It is hard to write some terse words of encouragement for using/testing
a program which we have worked on for so long. Nevertheless, we will try to
do it in this message.

CerbNG is a kernel module for FreeBSD version 4.x (5.x version soon to come).
Our main purpose is providing the administrator with tools for enforcing fine
grained control for critical system applications/processes/environments, i.e.
privileged daemons (not only those running with uid 0), and setuid programs.
But it is just a small part of CerbNG functionality.

Lead principles in CerbNG development are transparency and flexibility.
Sysadmins often do not have time and resources to patch all buggy applications,
even for security related vulnerabilities.

For defining the system protecting rules, we use a flexible language vaguely
similar to C. Some basic CerbNG capabilities are:

   - detailed control and validation of selected system calls and
     their arguments
   - ability of changing syscall arguments and returned values
   - possibility of modifying process properties and environment
   - modifying sysctls during process runtime depending on process
     behavior and context
   - precise and configurable logging
   - intuitive, flexible and powerful rule description language

Tarball for Version 1.0-RC1 contains some example policy files
described below:

openssh.cb - Controls sshd(8) (if sshd is running when
                          the policy is being loaded, it has to be
                          restarted). The policy degrades sshd
                          privileges after it's been started to uid
                          and gid for user/group sshd. CerbNG elevates
                          sshd rights for performing privileged
                          operations only.

passwd.cb - Controls passwd(1). Similarly to openssh.cb,
                          privileges of the passwd process are changed
                          to those of user running this program.
                          Privileges are degraded regardless of the
                          setuid bit on /usr/bin/passwd.

ping.cb, su.cb - Similar privilege degradation examples.

noexec-by-group.cb - Noexec for all users but root and members of
                          exec group. Additionally environment
                          variables with names beginning with LD_ are
                          checked.

degrade-unknown-sugids.cb - All setuid/setgid files, which are not
                          controlled by Cerb are denied elevated
                          privileges and run with credentials of
                          user performing the execve(2) syscall.

restricted-debug.cb - Using ptrace(2) and ktrace(2) syscalls will
                           be limited to root user and members of 'debug'
                           group.

restricted-link.cb - Non-root users will be denied the right to
                           create hard links to other users' files.

log-exec.cb - All execve(2) calls performed by
                           non-privileged users will be logged.

We encourage all interested members of FreeBSD community to testing, sharing
ideas/comments and last but not least - reporting bugs. We hope, that CerbNG
becomes another useful tool for improving security of servers running FreeBSD.

CerbNG CVS repository and latest tarballs are available at:

       http://sourceforge.net/projects/cerber/

For detailed installation instructions see INSTALL file, or HOWTO.html at:

        http://cerber.sourceforge.net/docs/HOWTO.html

Project HomePage:

       http://cerber.sourceforge.net/

We invite all interested users and would-be users to subscription of
our mailing lists. To subscribe those lists, visit:

        http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/cerber-list
        http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/cerber-commits

CerbNG authors are:

       Pawel Jakub Dawidek <nickgarage.freebsd.pl>
             Cerb project initiator, head programmer, kernel part
             developer, polish documentation author.

       Slawek Zak <zaksera.pl>
             Designer of CerbNG configuration language syntax and
             compiler structure, author of userland policy compiler,
             documentation translator.

PS. We are also preparing a technical document for BSDCon 2003.

--
Pawel Jakub Dawidek
UNIX Systems Administrator
http://garage.freebsd.pl
Am I Evil? Yes, I Am.

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