LOMAC: Low Water-Mark Integrity Protection for COTS Environments

We hypothesize that a form of kernel-resident accesscontrol-based integrity protection can gain widespread acceptance in Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) environments provided that 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 provides 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 wellsuited 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.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: SP
• Authors: Timothy Fraser
• Keywords: Accesscontrol-based Integrity Protection, Integrity Protection, Low Water-Mark, Security Privacy, SP 2000