On Fri, Jul 28, 2023 at 08:43:58AM +0000, David Laight wrote:

....

quoted

FWIW, I agree with Christian that these behaviours are not ideal (and
I'm working on a series that might allow for these things to be properly
blocked in the future) but there's also the consistency argument -- I
don't think fchownat() is much safer to allow in this way than
fchmodat() and (again) this behaviour is already possible through
procfs.

If the 'through procfs' involves readlink("/proc/self/fd/n") and
accessing through the returned path then the permission checks
are different.
Using the returned path requires search permissions on all the
directories.

That's *not* how "through procfs" works. The "magic symlinks" in
/proc/*/fd are not actual symlinks that get dereferenced to the
contents they readlink() to, but special-type objects that dereference
directly to the underlying file associated with the open file
description.

Rich