On 12.12.23 11:44, Amir Goldstein wrote:

On Tue, Dec 12, 2023 at 12:25 PM Roberto Sassu
[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On 11.12.23 19:01, Christian Brauner wrote:

quoted

quoted

The second problem is that one security.evm is not enough. We need two,
to store the two different HMACs. And we need both at the same time,
since when overlayfs is mounted the lower/upper directories can be
still accessible.

"Changes to the underlying filesystems while part of a mounted overlay
filesystem are not allowed. If the underlying filesystem is changed, the
behavior of the overlay is undefined, though it will not result in a
crash or deadlock."

https://docs.kernel.org/filesystems/overlayfs.html#changes-to-underlying-filesystems

So I don't know why this would be a problem.

+ Eric Snowberg

Ok, that would reduce the surface of attack. However, when looking at:

       ovl: Always reevaluate the file signature for IMA

       Commit db1d1e8b9867 ("IMA: use vfs_getattr_nosec to get the
i_version")
       partially closed an IMA integrity issue when directly modifying a file
       on the lower filesystem.  If the overlay file is first opened by a
user
       and later the lower backing file is modified by root, but the extended
       attribute is NOT updated, the signature validation succeeds with
the old
       original signature.

Ok, so if the behavior of overlayfs is undefined if the lower backing
file is modified by root, do we need to reevaluate? Or instead would be
better to forbid the write from IMA (legitimate, I think, since the
behavior is documented)? I just saw that we have d_real_inode(), we can
use it to determine if the write should be denied.

There may be several possible legitimate actions in this case, but the
overall concept IMO should be the same as I said about EVM -
overlayfs does not need an IMA signature of its own, because it
can use the IMA signature of the underlying file.

Whether overlayfs reads a file from lower fs or upper fs, it does not
matter, the only thing that matters is that the underlying file content
is attested when needed.

Just some thoughts...

Ok, so we attest the lower/upper file. What about the path the 
application specified to access that file (just an example)? Not that it 
particularly matters (we are not protecting it yet), but we are not 
recording in the IMA measurement list what the application 
requested/sees. I don't have a good example for inode metadata, but we 
already started recording them too.

Also, I'm thinking about overlayfs-own xattrs. Shouldn't they be 
protected? If they change during an offline attack, it would change how 
information are presented by overlayfs (I don't know much, for now).

Roberto

The only incident that requires special attention is copy-up.
This is what the security hooks security_inode_copy_up() and
security_inode_copy_up_xattr() are for.

When a file starts in state "lower" and has security.ima,evm xattrs
then before a user changes the file, it is copied up to upper fs
and suppose that security.ima,evm xattrs are copied as is?

When later the overlayfs file content is read from the upper copy
the security.ima signature should be enough to attest that file content
was not tampered with between going from "lower" to "upper".

security.evm may need to be fixed on copy up, but that should be
easy to do with the security_inode_copy_up_xattr() hook. No?

Thanks,
Amir.