On Tue, Oct 15, 2019 at 10:30:08AM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:

On Mon, Oct 14, 2019 at 01:03:08PM -0400, Joel Fernandes (Google) wrote:

quoted

In current mainline, the degree of access to perf_event_open(2) system
call depends on the perf_event_paranoid sysctl.  This has a number of
limitations:

1. The sysctl is only a single value. Many types of accesses are controlled
   based on the single value thus making the control very limited and
   coarse grained.
2. The sysctl is global, so if the sysctl is changed, then that means
   all processes get access to perf_event_open(2) opening the door to
   security issues.

This patch adds LSM and SELinux access checking which will be used in
Android to access perf_event_open(2) for the purposes of attaching BPF
programs to tracepoints, perf profiling and other operations from
userspace. These operations are intended for production systems.

5 new LSM hooks are added:
1. perf_event_open: This controls access during the perf_event_open(2)
   syscall itself. The hook is called from all the places that the
   perf_event_paranoid sysctl is checked to keep it consistent with the
   systctl. The hook gets passed a 'type' argument which controls CPU,
   kernel and tracepoint accesses (in this context, CPU, kernel and
   tracepoint have the same semantics as the perf_event_paranoid sysctl).
   Additionally, I added an 'open' type which is similar to
   perf_event_paranoid sysctl == 3 patch carried in Android and several other
   distros but was rejected in mainline [1] in 2016.

2. perf_event_alloc: This allocates a new security object for the event
   which stores the current SID within the event. It will be useful when
   the perf event's FD is passed through IPC to another process which may
   try to read the FD. Appropriate security checks will limit access.

3. perf_event_free: Called when the event is closed.

4. perf_event_read: Called from the read(2) and mmap(2) syscalls for the event.

5. perf_event_write: Called from the ioctl(2) syscalls for the event.

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/696240/

Since Peter had suggest LSM hooks in 2016 [1], I am adding his
Suggested-by tag below.

Thanks, I've queued the patch!

Thanks!

quoted

To use this patch, we set the perf_event_paranoid sysctl to -1 and then
apply selinux checking as appropriate (default deny everything, and then
add policy rules to give access to domains that need it). In the future
we can remove the perf_event_paranoid sysctl altogether.

This I'm not sure about; the sysctl is only redundant when you actually
use a security thingy, not everyone is. I always find them things to be
mightily unfriendly.

Right. I was just stating the above for the folks who use the security
controls.

thanks,

 - Joel