Re: [PATCH v4 2/4] namei: O_BENEATH-style path resolution flags

Hi Aleksa,

On Tue, 2018-11-13 at 01:26 +1100, Aleksa Sarai wrote:

* O_BENEATH: Disallow "escapes" from the starting point of the
  filesystem tree during resolution (you must stay "beneath" the
  starting point at all times). Currently this is done by disallowing
  ".." and absolute paths (either in the given path or found during
  symlink resolution) entirely, as well as all "magic link" jumping.

With open_tree(2) and OPEN_TREE_CLONE, will O_BENEATH still be
necessary? As I understand it, O_BENEATH could be replaced by a much
simpler flag that only disallows absolute paths (incl. absolute
symlinks). And it would have the benefit that you can actually pass the
tree/directory fd to another process and escaping would not be possible
even if that other process doesn't use O_BENEATH (after calling
mount_setattr(2) to make sure it's locked down).

This approach would also make it easy to restrict writes via a cloned
tree/directory fd by marking it read-only via mount_setattr(2) (and
locking down the read-only flag). This would again be especially useful
when passing tree/directory fds across processes, or for voluntary
self-lockdown within a process for robustness against security bugs.

This wouldn't affect any of the other flags in this patch. And for full
equivalence to O_BENEATH you'd have to use O_NOMAGICLINKS in addition
to O_NOABSOLUTE, or whatever that new flag would be called.

Or is OPEN_TREE_CLONE too expensive for this use case? Or is there
anything else I'm missing?

Jürg