Quoting Eric W. Biederman (ebiederm at xmission.com):

-UID: 28009                                                  
Status: O


When selinux is loaded the relax permission checks for writing
security.capable are not honored.  Which keeps file capabilities
from being used in user namespaces.

Stephen Smalley [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

Originally SELinux called the cap functions directly since there was no
stacking support in the infrastructure and one had to manually stack a
secondary module internally.  inode_setxattr and inode_removexattr
however were special cases because the cap functions would check
CAP_SYS_ADMIN for any non-capability attributes in the security.*
namespace, and we don't want to impose that requirement on setting
security.selinux.  Thus, we inlined the capabilities logic into the
selinux hook functions and adapted it appropriately.

Now that the permission checks in commoncap have evolved this
inlining of their contents has become a problem.  So restructure
selinux_inode_removexattr, and selinux_inode_setxattr to call
both the corresponding cap_inode_ function and dentry_has_perm
when the attribute is not a selinux security xattr.   This ensures
the policies of both commoncap and selinux are enforced.

This results in smack and selinux having the same basic structure
for setxattr and removexattr.  Performing their own special permission
checks when it is their modules xattr being written to, and deferring
to commoncap when that is not the case.  Then finally performing their
generic module policy on all xattr writes.

This structure is fine when you only consider stacking with the
commoncap lsm, but it becomes a problem if two lsms that don't want
the commoncap security checks on their own attributes need to be
stack.  This means there will need to be updates in the future as lsm
stacking is improved, but at least now the structure between smack and
selinux is common making the code easier to refactor.

This change also has the effect that selinux_linux_setotherxattr becomes
unnecessary so it is removed.

Fixes: 8db6c34f1dbc ("Introduce v3 namespaced file capabilities")
Fixes: 7bbf0e052b76 ("[PATCH] selinux merge")
Historical Tree: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tglx/history.git
Signed-off-by: "Eric W. Biederman" <redacted>

This is hairy, but it looks right:

Reviewed-by: Serge Hallyn <serge@hallyn.com>

thanks,
-serge
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