libselinux.so seems to get pulled in to lots of unsuspecting applications and libraries.... like the OpenSSL TPM engine, for example. It has a global function named context_free(). This is not clever.
I agree, but it is rather difficult to change at this point. libselinux did not do a good job of namespacing.
It would be good to change. It's causing unsuspecting applications to crash.
But if the function is already called by other non SELinux programs, pam, ssh, cron, coreutils It is not easy to remove/change.
See http://marc.info/?t=117882818800005&r=1&w=2 I'd recommend taking it up again on selinux list, preferably with patches to introduce the new prefixed interfaces and to deprecate the old ones. Then some day we can actually drop them altogether.
In the meantime, we are shipping packages in Fedora which segfault due to libselinux hijacking their internal functions....
Shouldn't they be handling this? Isn't there a way for these tools to force the use of their internal function rather then using the libselinux global?
The ELF lookup path is well defined. It's easy enough for a program author to get the expected result. libselinux works fine if a different context_free comes first in the lookup path because it doesn't use the PLT for internal calls. So it is only a matter of always listing all dependencies on the linker command line and providing the -l option is the correct order. Everything else just works fine. In an ideal world libselinux would have all interfaces with a unique prefix. But it is what it is and having incapable programmers is no justification for breaking binary compatibility.
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