E Eric W. Biederman #
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"Serge E. Hallyn" [off-list ref] writes:
A common way for daemons to run with minimal privilege is to start as root, perhaps setuid-root, choose a desired capability set, set PR_SET_KEEPCAPS, then change uid to non-root. A simpler way to achieve this is to set file capabilities on a not-setuid-root binary. However, when installing a package inside a (user-namespaced) container, packages cannot be installed with file capabilities. For this reason, containers must install ping setuid-root.
Don't ping sockets avoid that specific problem? I expect the general case still holds.
To achieve this, we would need for containers to be able to request file capabilities be added to a file without causing these to be honored in the initial user namespace. To this end, the patch below introduces a new capability xattr format. The main enhancement over the existing security.capability xattr is that we tag capability sets with a uid - the uid of the root user in the namespace where the capabilities are set. The capabilities will be ignored in any other namespace. The special case of uid == -1 (which must only ever be able to be set by kuid 0) means use the capabilities in all namespaces.
A quick comment on this. We currently allow capabilities that have been gained to be valid in all descendent user namespaces. Applying this principle to the on-disk capabilities would make it so that uid 0 would mean capabilities in all namespaces. It might be worth it to introduce a fixed sized array with a length parameter of perhaps 32 entries which is a path of root uids as seen by the initial user namespace. That way the entire construction of the user namespace could be verified. AKA verify the current user namespace and the parent and the parents parent. Up to the user namespace the current filesystem is mounted in. We would look at how much space allows an xattr to be stored without causing filesystems a challenge to properly size such an array. Given that uids are fundamentally flat that might not be particularly useful. If we add an alternative way of identifying user namespaces say a privileged operation that set a uuid, then the complete path would be more interesting.
An alternative format would use a pair of uids to indicate a range of rootids. This would allow root in a user namespace with uids 100000-165536 mapped to set the xattr once on a file, then launch nested containers wherein the file could be used with privilege. That's not what this patch does, but would be a trivial change if people think it would be worthwhile. This patch does not actually address the real problem, which is setting the xattrs from inside containers. For that, I think the best solution is to add a pair of new system calls, setfcap and getfcap. Userspace would for instance call fsetfcap(fd, cap_user_header_t, cap_user_data_t), to which the kernel would, if not in init_user_ns, react by writing an appropriate security.nscapability xattr.
That feels hard to maintain, but you may be correct that we have a small
enough userspace that it would not be a problem.
Eric
quoted hunk
The libcap2 library's cap_set_file/cap_get_file could be switched over transparently to use this to hide its use from all callers. Comments appreciated. Note - In this patch, file capabilities only work for containers which have a root uid defined. We may want to allow -1 uids to work in all namespaces. There certainly would be uses for this, but I'm a bit unsettled about the implications of allowing a program privilege in a container where there is no uid with privilege. This needs more thought. Signed-off-by: Serge Hallyn <redacted> --- include/linux/capability.h | 15 +++++ include/uapi/linux/capability.h | 47 ++++++++++++++ include/uapi/linux/xattr.h | 3 + security/commoncap.c | 135 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-- 4 files changed, 194 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-)diff --git a/include/linux/capability.h b/include/linux/capability.h index af9f0b9..24ac18e 100644 --- a/include/linux/capability.h +++ b/include/linux/capability.h@@ -13,6 +13,7 @@ #define _LINUX_CAPABILITY_H #include <uapi/linux/capability.h> +#include <linux/uidgid.h> #define _KERNEL_CAPABILITY_VERSION _LINUX_CAPABILITY_VERSION_3@@ -31,6 +32,20 @@ struct cpu_vfs_cap_data { kernel_cap_t inheritable; }; +struct cpu_vfs_ns_cap_data { + __u32 flags; + kuid_t rootid; + kernel_cap_t permitted; + kernel_cap_t inheritable;