On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 01:48:16PM +0100, Jann Horn wrote:

On Fri, Dec 04, 2015 at 02:21:16PM -0600, Serge E. Hallyn wrote:

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Quoting Eric W. Biederman (ebiederm@xmission.com):

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"Serge E. Hallyn" [off-list ref] writes:

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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.

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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.

really since security.capability xattrs are currently honored in all
namespaces this isn't really necessary.  Until and unless Seth's set
changes that.

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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.

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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

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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.

So for actually enabling (user-namespaced) containers to use these, there
are a few possibilities that come to mine.

1. A new setfcap (/getfcap) syscall.  Uses mapped uid 0 from
current_user_ns() to write a value in the security.nscapability xattr.
Userspace doesn't need to worry at all about namespace issues.

Your patch has an "ncaps" field and supports giving (possibly different)
privileges to different namespace root users.
I think that with a setfcap() syscall as you describe, it would be hard
to add more than one security.nscapability entry to a file without
poking holes into stuff:

If setfcap() requires inode write access, every namespace root for whom
a security.nscapability entry can be added can overwrite the file, so
namespace roots might be able to execute code as each other.

If setfcap() doesn't require inode write access, that isn't a big
security issue, but it allows unprivileged users to waste disk space
in a writable-mounted filesystem on which they have no write access
anywhere. I'm not sure whether that is a sufficiently big problem for
anyone to care.


Another issue with this would be that it makes restoring sub-namespace
capabilities from a backup somewhat ugly, at least if you're not in the
init ns: You'd have to parse the capabilities attribute, then, for every
attribute you want to restore whose rootid doesn't refer to your
namespace, clone(CLONE_NEWUSER), map the target uid to 0 from the parent
process, seteuid(0), do the setfcap() and exit.

It would require less synchronization with my ptrace hardening patch
that checks whether uids are mapped (if that lands, I don't think it has
yet?) because that would allow you to first setuid, then clone(), map
the uid to 0 inside the namespace and setfcap(), but it'd still require
special-case code in backup software.

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2. Just expect userspace to write a xattr;  kernel checks that no values
are changed for any other namespaces.  This could be a lot of parsing and
verifying in the kernel.

This option would allow the first problem I described with option 1 (if
it is a problem?) to be worked around by letting a helper in the outer
namespace add capabilities for lower namespaces - but it wouldn't be

Note that regardless, the fscaps would still be stored as an xattr.
The setfcap/getfacp syscalls would be for convenience, but a suitably
privileged task in the init_user_ns could just write the xattr.

You've made a good point here and in your prev email: when a namespaced
file cap exists for say uid 1000, perhaps it should apply for every
descendent ns of uid 1000.  In this case maybe it makes sense to drop
the nscaps field and actually only allow one namespace fscap.  It must
be set by the owner of the file (i.e., uid 1000, or uid 0 if a
host-root-owned file) or someone privileged over it (i.e. uid 100000
who is root in his ns and i_sb->s_user_ns->owner for the file).

So if the host has /bin/ping with cap_net_raw=ep, any user in any
ns which can reach and xecute it can run the file with those privileges
(in their own ns).  If uid 1000 creates a user_ns with root 100000,
that container can create a $rootfs/bin/ping with cap_net_raw=ep
with uid tag 100000.  If that container creates a sub-container owned
by uid 150000, that container can also run $rootfs/bin/ping with
cap_net_raw=ep, but uid 1001 on the host does not.  Now we don't have
the risk of wasting disk space, and restoring a cap-endowed file in
a sub-userns is trivial.

In this case we can probably also do away with the setfcap() syscall,
as userspace only needs to look for the "0 x y" /proc/self/uid_map
entry and enter x in the xattr.

Does this seem reasonable and somewhat risk-averse?