On Mon, Aug 25, 2025 at 9:43 AM Andy Lutomirski [off-list ref] wrote:

On Mon, Aug 25, 2025 at 2:31 AM Mickaël Salaün [off-list ref] wrote:

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On Sun, Aug 24, 2025 at 11:04:03AM -0700, Andy Lutomirski wrote:

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On Sun, Aug 24, 2025 at 4:03 AM Mickaël Salaün [off-list ref] wrote:

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On Fri, Aug 22, 2025 at 09:45:32PM +0200, Jann Horn wrote:

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On Fri, Aug 22, 2025 at 7:08 PM Mickaël Salaün [off-list ref] wrote:

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Add a new O_DENY_WRITE flag usable at open time and on opened file (e.g.
passed file descriptors).  This changes the state of the opened file by
making it read-only until it is closed.  The main use case is for script
interpreters to get the guarantee that script' content cannot be altered
while being read and interpreted.  This is useful for generic distros
that may not have a write-xor-execute policy.  See commit a5874fde3c08
("exec: Add a new AT_EXECVE_CHECK flag to execveat(2)")

Both execve(2) and the IOCTL to enable fsverity can already set this
property on files with deny_write_access().  This new O_DENY_WRITE make

The kernel actually tried to get rid of this behavior on execve() in
commit 2a010c41285345da60cece35575b4e0af7e7bf44.; but sadly that had
to be reverted in commit 3b832035387ff508fdcf0fba66701afc78f79e3d
because it broke userspace assumptions.

Oh, good to know.

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it widely available.  This is similar to what other OSs may provide
e.g., opening a file with only FILE_SHARE_READ on Windows.

We used to have the analogous mmap() flag MAP_DENYWRITE, and that was
removed for security reasons; as
https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/mmap.2.html says:

|        MAP_DENYWRITE
|               This flag is ignored.  (Long ago—Linux 2.0 and earlier—it
|               signaled that attempts to write to the underlying file
|               should fail with ETXTBSY.  But this was a source of denial-
|               of-service attacks.)"

It seems to me that the same issue applies to your patch - it would
allow unprivileged processes to essentially lock files such that other
processes can't write to them anymore. This might allow unprivileged
users to prevent root from updating config files or stuff like that if
they're updated in-place.

Yes, I agree, but since it is the case for executed files I though it
was worth starting a discussion on this topic.  This new flag could be
restricted to executable files, but we should avoid system-wide locks
like this.  I'm not sure how Windows handle these issues though.

Anyway, we should rely on the access control policy to control write and
execute access in a consistent way (e.g. write-xor-execute).  Thanks for
the references and the background!

I'm confused.  I understand that there are many contexts in which one
would want to prevent execution of unapproved content, which might
include preventing a given process from modifying some code and then
executing it.

I don't understand what these deny-write features have to do with it.
These features merely prevent someone from modifying code *that is
currently in use*, which is not at all the same thing as preventing
modifying code that might get executed -- one can often modify
contents *before* executing those contents.

The order of checks would be:
1. open script with O_DENY_WRITE
2. check executability with AT_EXECVE_CHECK
3. read the content and interpret it

Hmm.  Common LSM configurations should be able to handle this without
deny write, I think.  If you don't want a program to be able to make
their own scripts, then don't allow AT_EXECVE_CHECK to succeed on a
script that the program can write.

Yes, Common LSM could handle this, however, due to historic and app
backward compability reason, sometimes it is impossible to enforce
that kind of policy in practice, therefore as an alternative, a
machinism such as AT_EXECVE_CHECK is really useful.

Keep in mind that trying to lock this down too hard is pointless for
users who are allowed to to ptrace-write to their own processes.  Or
for users who can do JIT, or for users who can run a REPL, etc.

The ptrace-write and /proc/pid/mem writing are on my radar, at least
for ChomeOS and Android.
AT_EXECVE_CHECK is orthogonal to those IMO, I hope eventually all
those paths will be hardened.

Thanks and regards,
-Jeff