[PATCH v2] xattr: Enable security.capability in user namespaces
flat view
From: Eric W. Biederman <hidden>
Date: 2017-07-13 12:19:38
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lkml, oe-lkp
Theodore Ts'o [off-list ref] writes:
I'm really confused what problem that is trying to be solved, here, but it **feels** really, really wrong. Why do we need to store all of this state on a per-file basis, instead of some kind of per-file system or per-container data structure? And how many of these security.foo at uid=bar xattrs do you expect there to be? How many "foo", and how many "bar"? Maybe I missed the full write up, in which case please send me a link to the full writeup --- ideally in the form of a design doc that explains the problem statement, gives some examples of how it's going to be used, what were the other alternatives that were considered, and why they were rejected, etc.
The concise summary: Today we have the xattr security.capable that holds a set of capabilities that an application gains when executed. AKA setuid root exec without actually being setuid root. User namespaces have the concept of capabilities that are not global but are limited to their user namespace. We do not currently have filesystem support for this concept. We currently have two proposals on the table. One is to bump the revision number of security.capable and add more information in that xattr. The other is to use a sligthly different capability name. We are currently evaluating between the two proposals. Given that it appears the IMA xattrs will want similar treatment coming up with a good pattern to follow is part of the analysis here. Eric -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-security-module" in the body of a message to majordomo at vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html