Thread (18 messages) 18 messages, 7 authors, 2025-05-13

Re: [PATCH 1/2] fs/exec: Explicitly unshare fs_struct on exec

From: "Andy Lutomirski" <luto@kernel.org>
Date: 2022-10-14 03:19:01
Also in: linux-fsdevel, linux-hardening, linux-mm, lkml, selinux


On Thu, Oct 6, 2022, at 7:13 AM, Jann Horn wrote:
On Thu, Oct 6, 2022 at 11:05 AM Christian Brauner [off-list ref] wrote:
quoted
On Thu, Oct 06, 2022 at 01:27:34AM -0700, Kees Cook wrote:
quoted
The check_unsafe_exec() counting of n_fs would not add up under a heavily
threaded process trying to perform a suid exec, causing the suid portion
to fail. This counting error appears to be unneeded, but to catch any
possible conditions, explicitly unshare fs_struct on exec, if it ends up
Isn't this a potential uapi break? Afaict, before this change a call to
clone{3}(CLONE_FS) followed by an exec in the child would have the
parent and child share fs information. So if the child e.g., changes the
working directory post exec it would also affect the parent. But after
this change here this would no longer be true. So a child changing a
workding directoro would not affect the parent anymore. IOW, an exec is
accompanied by an unshare(CLONE_FS). Might still be worth trying ofc but
it seems like a non-trivial uapi change but there might be few users
that do clone{3}(CLONE_FS) followed by an exec.
I believe the following code in Chromium explicitly relies on this
behavior, but I'm not sure whether this code is in active use anymore:

https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:sandbox/linux/suid/sandbox.c;l=101?q=CLONE_FS&sq=&ss=chromium
Wait, this is absolutely nucking futs.  On a very quick inspection, the sharable things like this are fs, files, sighand, and io.    files and sighand get unshared, which makes sense.  fs supposedly checks for extra refs and prevents gaining privilege.  io is... ignored!  At least it's not immediately obvious that io is a problem.

But seriously, this makes no sense at all.  It should not be possible to exec a program and then, without ptrace, change its cwd out from under it.  Do we really need to preserve this behavior?

--Andy
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