On Wed, 28 Aug 2019 21:07:24 -0700
Alexei Starovoitov [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

This won’t make me much more comfortable, since CAP_BPF lets it do an ever-growing set of nasty things. I’d much rather one or both of two things happen:

1. Give it CAP_TRACING only. It can leak my data, but it’s rather hard for it to crash my laptop, lose data, or cause other shenanigans.

2. Improve it a bit do all the privileged ops are wrapped by capset().

Does this make sense?  I’m a security person on occasion. I find
vulnerabilities and exploit them deliberately and I break things by
accident on a regular basis. In my considered opinion, CAP_TRACING
alone, even extended to cover part of BPF as I’ve described, is
decently safe. Getting root with just CAP_TRACING will be decently
challenging, especially if I don’t get to read things like sshd’s
memory, and improvements to mitigate even that could be added.  I
am quite confident that attacks starting with CAP_TRACING will have
clear audit signatures if auditing is on.  I am also confident that
CAP_BPF *will* allow DoS and likely privilege escalation, and this
will only get more likely as BPF gets more widely used. And, if
BPF-based auditing ever becomes a thing, writing to the audit
daemon’s maps will be a great way to cover one’s tracks.  

CAP_TRACING, as I'm proposing it, will allow full tracefs access.
I think Steven and Massami prefer that as well.
That includes kprobe with probe_kernel_read.
That also means mini-DoS by installing kprobes everywhere or running
too much ftrace.

I was talking with Kees at Plumbers about this, and we were talking
about just using simple file permissions. I started playing with some
patches to allow the tracefs be visible but by default it would only be
visible by root.

 rwx------

Then a start up script (or perhaps mount options) could change the
group owner, and change this to:

 rwxrwx---

Where anyone in the group assigned (say "tracing") gets full access to
the file system.

The more I was playing with this, the less I see the need for
CAP_TRACING for ftrace and reading the format files.

-- Steve