Analysis and Study of Security Mechanisms inside Linux Kernel

It's very important to analyze and study security mechanisms provided by an operating system. Currently, Linux is becoming one of the most popular operating systems because of its excellent performance and open source philosophy. Since lots of individuals and enterprises are switching to Linux, access control mechanism of Linux has been improved from time to time for new security requirements. For instance, SELinux sub-system can enforce a policy based Mandatory Access Control (MAC) and provide flexible security policy configuration. However, there are still some defects in current Linux access control mechanism. In this paper, available Linux security mechanisms are analyzed at first, while permission division principle is summarized. Then a new MAC mechanism is devised based on some popular information security models such as RBAC, DTE and etc and it is characteristic of cross-layered permission assignment. Finally, a corresponding prototype system is implemented and further research directions are summarized.