Re: [PATCH 1/1] simplified security.nscapability xattr

From: Serge E. Hallyn <hidden>
Date: 2016-05-10 19:00:12
Also in: lkml

Quoting Eric W. Biederman (ebiederm-aS9lmoZGLiVWk0Htik3J/w@public.gmane.org):

"Andrew G. Morgan" [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

On 2 May 2016 6:04 p.m., "Eric W. Biederman" [off-list ref]
wrote:

quoted

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

quoted

On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 03:39:54PM -0700, Kees Cook wrote:

quoted

On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 3:26 PM, Serge E. Hallyn

[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Quoting Kees Cook (keescook-F7+t8E8rja9g9hUCZPvPmw@public.gmane.org):

quoted

On Fri, Apr 22, 2016 at 10:26 AM, [off-list ref]

wrote:

quoted

From: Serge Hallyn <serge.hallyn-GeWIH/nMZzLQT0dZR+AlfA@public.gmane.org>

...

quoted

This looks like userspace must knowingly be aware that it is

in a

quoted

namespace and to DTRT instead of it being translated by the

kernel

quoted

when setxattr is called under !init_user_ns?

Yes - my libcap2 patch checks /proc/self/uid_map to decide

that. If that

quoted

shows you are in init_user_ns then it uses security.capability,

otherwise

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it uses security.nscapability.

I've occasionally considered having the xattr code do the quiet
substitution if need be.

In fact, much of this structure comes from when I was still

trying to

quoted

do multiple values per xattr. Given what we're doing here, we

could

quoted

keep the xattr contents exactly the same, just changing the

name.

quoted

So userspace could just get and set security.capability; if you

are

quoted

in a non-init user_ns, if security.capability is set then you

cannot

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set it; if security.capability is not set, then the kernel

writes

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security.nscapability instead and returns success.

I don't like magic, but this might be just straightforward

enough

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to not be offensive. Thoughts?

Yeah, I think it might be better to have the magic in this case,

since

quoted

it seems weird to just reject setxattr if a tool didn't realize

it was

quoted

in a namespace. I'm not sure -- it is also nice to have an

explicit

quoted

API here.

I would defer to Eric or Michael on that. I keep going back and

forth,

quoted

though I suspect it's probably best to do what you already have
(explicit API).

Michael, Eric, what do you think? The choice we're making here is
whether we should

1. Keep a nice simple separate pair of xattrs, the pre-existing
security.capability which can only be written from init_user_ns,
and the new (in this patch) security.nscapability which you can
write to any file where you are privileged wrt the file.

2. Make security.capability somewhat 'magic' - if someone in a
non-initial user ns tries to write it and has privilege wrt the
file, then the kernel silently writes security.nscapability

instead.

quoted

The biggest drawback of (1) would be any tar-like program trying
to restore a file which had security.capability, needing to know
to detect its userns and write the security.nscapability instead.
The drawback of (2) is ~\o/~ magic.

Apologies for not having followed this more closely before.

I don't like either option. I think we will be in much better shape

if

quoted

we upgrade the capability xattr. It seems totally wrong or at least
confusing for a file to have both capability xattrs.

Just using security.capability allows us to confront any weird

issues

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with mixing both the old semantics and the new semantics.

We had previously discussioned extending the capbility a little and
adding a uid who needed to be the root uid in a user namespace, to

be

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valid. Using the owner of the file seems simpler, and even a little
more transparent as this makes the security.capability xattr a

limited

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form of setuid (which it semantically is).

So I believe the new semantics in general are an improvement.


Given the expected use case let me ask as simple question: Are there

any

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known cases where the owner of a setcap exectuable is not root?

I expect the pile of setcap exectuables is small enough we can go
through the top distros and look at all of the setcap executlables.


If there is not a need to support setcap executables owned by

non-root,

quoted

I suspect the right play is to just change the semantics to always

treat

quoted

the security.capability attribute this way.

I guess I'm confused how we have strayed so far that this isn't an
obvious requirement. Uid=0 as being the root of privilege was the
basic problem that capabilities were designed to change.

uid==0 as the owner of a file is slightly different from uid==0 of a
running process.  Last I checked if it is installed as part of a
distribution the programs are owned by root by default.

Note that this does mean that a user namespace without a mapping for a
uid 0 cannot use file capabilities.

But I'm not sure there is a way around that.  Even if we store the
userns identifier in an xattr instead of using the file owner, we still
need to uniquely identify the namespace somehow, and as Jann pointed
out using the namespace creator uid is non-ideal as it means all namespaces
even with disjoint uid mappings can mess with each other.

quoted

Uid is an acl concept. Capabilities are supposed to be independent of
that.

I don't have a clue what you mean.  Posix capabilities on executables
are part of discretionary access control.  Whatever their rules posix
capabilities are just watered down versions of the permissions of
a setuid root exectuable.  I don't think anyone has ever actually run a
system with setuid root exectuables not being special.  If you are

I actually suspect Andrew does, and I've done it though only as an
experiment.  (Oh - but I may mean something different than what you
mean, see below)

thinking of what any other system call capabilities unix calls those are
file descriptors.

I don't think it is necessarily wrong that files that hold exectuable
programs need to be owned by a user that is trusted to install files
system wide.  So far that user in my limited sampling that user is
always root.  Given that installing a program like that is fundamentally
a very privileged role we may not be able to break it up successfully,
so root as the owner of program files seems to make a lot of sense.

How would you design a system wide program installer in a root less
system?

The root id is still special, in the same sense as it is in plan 9 - it
is the uid which "owns" the hardware.  In linux setuid always still
works - it just can be configured to not raise/drop privileges on
setuid.  (You know all this, but someone reading along may have
forgotten)

The question then is what it should take to set and to use a file
capability.

So what we have right now is afaics a technical roadblock - in that I
really can't see a way to safely allow filecaps in a userns without a
uid 0 mapping.  It's unfortunate, and it's not a goal, it's an implementation
detail.  I personally think it is a huge improvement over what we have.
The question is does doing it this way now prevent us from doing it
the right way later if we can find a right way?

Does anyone know any linux based system that uses file capabilities on
executables without setting the executable to be owned by root?  One
example would be all that it takes to shut down this marvelous
simplification that I see.


I strongly suspect the reality is that all that exists are watered down
setuid root exectuables.  If that is indeed the case we can safely let
file caps only be valid if root owns the file.  That would be convinient
at it is much simpler to understand and implement and audit.


I really don't care either way except that I like simpler code, and I
like not breaking userspace.

Eric

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