On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 7:59 PM Kees Cook [off-list ref] wrote:

There are a few places in the kernel where LSMs would like to have
visibility into the contents of a kernel buffer that has been loaded or
read. While security_kernel_post_read_file() (which includes the
buffer) exists as a pairing for security_kernel_read_file(), no such
hook exists to pair with security_kernel_load_data().

Earlier proposals for just using security_kernel_post_read_file() with a
NULL file argument were rejected (i.e. "file" should always be valid for
the security_..._file hooks, but it appears at least one case was
left in the kernel during earlier refactoring. (This will be fixed in
a subsequent patch.)

Since not all cases of security_kernel_load_data() can have a single
contiguous buffer made available to the LSM hook (e.g. kexec image
segments are separately loaded), there needs to be a way for the LSM to
reason about its expectations of the hook coverage. In order to handle
this, add a "contents" argument to the "kernel_load_data" hook that
indicates if the newly added "kernel_post_load_data" hook will be called
with the full contents once loaded. That way, LSMs requiring full contents
can choose to unilaterally reject "kernel_load_data" with contents=false
(which is effectively the existing hook coverage), but when contents=true
they can allow it and later evaluate the "kernel_post_load_data" hook
once the buffer is loaded.

With this change, LSMs can gain coverage over non-file-backed data loads
(e.g. init_module(2) and firmware userspace helper), which will happen
in subsequent patches.

Additionally prepare IMA to start processing these cases.

Signed-off-by: Kees Cook <redacted>

Thanks for adding this! Would be really useful for us.

Reviewed-by: KP Singh <redacted>

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 drivers/base/firmware_loader/fallback.c       |  2 +-

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