On Wed, Mar 18, 2020 at 5:42 PM Richard Guy Briggs [off-list ref] wrote:

On 2020-03-18 17:01, Paul Moore wrote:

quoted

On Fri, Mar 13, 2020 at 3:23 PM Richard Guy Briggs [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On 2020-03-13 12:42, Paul Moore wrote:

...

quoted

quoted

The thread has had a lot of starts/stops, so I may be repeating a
previous suggestion, but one idea would be to still emit a "death
record" when the final task in the audit container ID does die, but
block the particular audit container ID from reuse until it the
SIGNAL2 info has been reported.  This gives us the timely ACID death
notification while still preventing confusion and ambiguity caused by
potentially reusing the ACID before the SIGNAL2 record has been sent;
there is a small nit about the ACID being present in the SIGNAL2
*after* its death, but I think that can be easily explained and
understood by admins.

Thinking quickly about possible technical solutions to this, maybe it
makes sense to have two counters on a contobj so that we know when the
last process in that container exits and can issue the death
certificate, but we still block reuse of it until all further references
to it have been resolved.  This will likely also make it possible to
report the full contid chain in SIGNAL2 records.  This will eliminate
some of the issues we are discussing with regards to passing a contobj
vs a contid to the audit_log_contid function, but won't eliminate them
all because there are still some contids that won't have an object
associated with them to make it impossible to look them up in the
contobj lists.

I'm not sure you need a full second counter, I imagine a simple flag
would be okay.  I think you just something to indicate that this ACID
object is marked as "dead" but it still being held for sanity reasons
and should not be reused.

Ok, I see your point.  This refcount can be changed to a flag easily
enough without change to the api if we can be sure that more than one
signal can't be delivered to the audit daemon *and* collected by sig2.
I'll have a more careful look at the audit daemon code to see if I can
determine this.

Maybe I'm not understanding your concern, but this isn't really
different than any of the other things we track for the auditd signal
sender, right?  If we are worried about multiple signals being sent
then it applies to everything, not just the audit container ID.

Another question occurs to me is that what if the audit daemon is sent a
signal and it cannot or will not collect the sig2 information from the
kernel (SIGKILL?)?  Does that audit container identifier remain dead
until reboot, or do we institute some other form of reaping, possibly
time-based?

In order to preserve the integrity of the audit log that ACID value
would need to remain unavailable until the ACID which contains the
associated auditd is "dead" (no one can request the signal sender's
info if that container is dead).

-- 
paul moore
www.paul-moore.com