Re: linux-next: manual merge of the audit tree with the security tree

[Heiko Carstens]

On Fri, Jun 24, 2016 at 12:20:52PM -0400, Paul Moore wrote:
> > I'm a bit concerned about user space pointers passed as argument for compat
> > tasks. These need to mask out 33 instead of 32 bits.  This is of course
> > system call specific and I don't know enough about audit to tell if it
> > could be a problem.
> 
> From a practical point of view I'm not sure how much of an impact that
> will have as it is unlikely anyone will be doing anything useful with
> those pointer values; for example, you aren't going to be inspecting a
> process' memory space using just the audit log.  Also, at the very
> least we aren't removing any information, just adding in an extra bit
> of potential junk.  Anyone who does care about user space pointers in
> the audit log, should have all the information the need to drop the
> high bit.
> 
> Does that sound reasonable?

Yes, it does. If there should be problems because of the one extra bit that
potentially contains garbage we still can look for a way to fix this.

Thanks!