Thread (34 messages) 34 messages, 4 authors, 2022-11-22

Re: [PATCH v4 2/5] security: Rewrite security_old_inode_init_security()

From: Roberto Sassu <hidden>
Date: 2022-11-21 09:46:11
Also in: linux-integrity, lkml, ocfs2-devel, selinux

On Thu, 2022-11-17 at 08:03 -0500, Mimi Zohar wrote:
Hi Roberto,

On Thu, 2022-11-10 at 10:46 +0100, Roberto Sassu wrote:
quoted
From: Roberto Sassu <roberto.sassu@huawei.com>

Rewrite security_old_inode_init_security() to call
security_inode_init_security() before making changes to support multiple
LSMs providing xattrs. Do it so that the required changes are done only in
one place.
Only security_inode_init_security() has support for EVM.   Making
security_old_inode_init_security() a wrapper for
security_inode_init_security() could result in security.evm extended
attributes being created that previously weren't created.

In fact ocfs2 defines ocfs2_init_security_get() as a wrapper for both
the old and new inode_init_security calls based on the caller's
preference.   Only mknod and symlink seem to use the old function. 
Wondering why do they differentiate between callers?  (Cc'ing the ocfs2
mailing list as they're affected by this change.)

"[PATCH v4 1/5] reiserfs: Add missing calls to
reiserfs_security_free()"  fixed a memory leak.  I couldn't tell if
there was a similar memory leak in ocfs2, the only other user of
security_old_inode_init_security().
From what I see, there is no memory leak there.
As ocfs2 already defines initxattrs, that leaves only reiserfs missing
initxattrs().  A better, cleaner solution would be to define one.
If I understood why security_old_inode_init_security() is called
instead of security_inode_init_security(), the reason seems that the
filesystem code uses the length of the obtained xattr to make some
calculations (e.g. reserve space). The xattr is written at a later
time.

Since for reiserfs there is a plan to deprecate it, it probably
wouldn't be worth to support the creation of multiple xattrs. I would
define a callback to take the first xattr and make a copy, so that
calling security_inode_init_security() + reiserfs_initxattrs() is
equivalent to calling security_old_inode_init_security().

But then, this is what anyway I was doing with the
security_initxattrs() callback, for all callers of security_old_inode_i
nit_security().

Also, security_old_inode_init_security() is exported to kernel modules.
Maybe, it is used somewhere. So, unless we plan to remove it
completely, it should be probably be fixed to avoid multiple LSMs
successfully setting an xattr, and losing the memory of all except the
last (which this patch fixes by calling security_inode_init_security())
.

If there is still the preference, I will implement the reiserfs
callback and make a fix for security_old_inode_init_security().

Thanks

Roberto
thanks,

Mimi
quoted
Define the security_initxattrs() callback and pass it to
security_inode_init_security() as argument, to obtain the first xattr
provided by LSMs.

This behavior is a bit different from the current one. Before this patch
calling call_int_hook() could cause multiple LSMs to provide an xattr,
since call_int_hook() does not stop when an LSM returns zero. The caller of
security_old_inode_init_security() receives the last xattr set. The pointer
of the xattr value of previous LSMs is lost, causing memory leaks.

However, in practice, this scenario does not happen as the only in-tree
LSMs providing an xattr at inode creation time are SELinux and Smack, which
are mutually exclusive.

Signed-off-by: Roberto Sassu <roberto.sassu@huawei.com>b
  
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