(I'm off work today and plan to reply also to Paul's comments next
week, but for now let me at least share a couple quick thoughts on
Daniel's patch.)

On Fri, May 28, 2021 at 11:56 AM Daniel Borkmann [off-list ref] wrote:

On 5/28/21 9:09 AM, Daniel Borkmann wrote:

quoted

On 5/28/21 3:37 AM, Paul Moore wrote:

quoted

On Mon, May 17, 2021 at 5:22 AM Ondrej Mosnacek [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Commit 59438b46471a ("security,lockdown,selinux: implement SELinux
lockdown") added an implementation of the locked_down LSM hook to
SELinux, with the aim to restrict which domains are allowed to perform
operations that would breach lockdown.

However, in several places the security_locked_down() hook is called in
situations where the current task isn't doing any action that would
directly breach lockdown, leading to SELinux checks that are basically
bogus.

Since in most of these situations converting the callers such that
security_locked_down() is called in a context where the current task
would be meaningful for SELinux is impossible or very non-trivial (and
could lead to TOCTOU issues for the classic Lockdown LSM
implementation), fix this by modifying the hook to accept a struct cred
pointer as argument, where NULL will be interpreted as a request for a
"global", task-independent lockdown decision only. Then modify SELinux
to ignore calls with cred == NULL.

I'm not overly excited about skipping the access check when cred is
NULL.  Based on the description and the little bit that I've dug into
thus far it looks like using SECINITSID_KERNEL as the subject would be
much more appropriate.  *Something* (the kernel in most of the
relevant cases it looks like) is requesting that a potentially
sensitive disclosure be made, and ignoring it seems like the wrong
thing to do.  Leaving the access control intact also provides a nice
avenue to audit these requests should users want to do that.

I think the rationale/workaround for ignoring calls with cred == NULL (or the previous
patch with the unimplemented hook) from Ondrej was two-fold, at least speaking for his
seen tracing cases:

   i) The audit events that are triggered due to calls to security_locked_down()
      can OOM kill a machine, see below details [0].

  ii) It seems to be causing a deadlock via slow_avc_audit() -> audit_log_end()
      when presumingly trying to wake up kauditd [1].

Actually, I wasn't aware of the deadlock... But calling an LSM hook
[that is backed by a SELinux access check] from within a BPF helper is
calling for all kinds of trouble, so I'm not surprised :)

Ondrej / Paul / Jiri: at least for the BPF tracing case specifically (I haven't looked
at the rest but it's also kind of independent), the attached fix should address both
reported issues, please take a look & test.

Thanks, I like this solution, although there are a few gotchas:

1. This patch creates a slight "regression" in that if someone flips
the Lockdown LSM into lockdown mode on runtime, existing (already
loaded) BPF programs will still be able to call the
confidentiality-breaching helpers, while before the lockdown would
apply also to them. Personally, I don't think it's a big deal (and I
bet there are other existing cases where some handle kept from before
lockdown could leak data), but I wanted to mention it in case someone
thinks the opposite.

2. IIUC. when a BPF program is rejected due to lockdown/SELinux, the
kernel will return -EINVAL to userspace (looking at
check_helper_call() in kernel/bpf/verifier.c; didn't have time to look
at other callers...). It would be nicer if the error code from the
security_locked_down() call would be passed through the call chain and
eventually returned to the caller. It should be relatively
straightforward to convert bpf_base_func_proto() to return a PTR_ERR()
instead of NULL on error, but it looks like this would result in quite
a big patch updating all the callers (and callers of callers, etc.)
with a not-so-small chance of missing some NULL check and introducing
a bug... I guess we could live with EINVAL-on-denied in stable kernels
and only have the error path refactoring in -next; I'm not sure...

3. This is a bit of a shot-in-the-dark, but I suppose there might be
some BPF programs that would be able to do something useful also when
the read_kernel helpers return an error, yet the kernel will now
outright refuse to load them (when the lockdown hook returns nonzero).
I have no idea if such BPF programs realistically exist in practice,
but perhaps it would be worth returning some dummy
always-error-returning helper function instead of NULL from
bpf_base_func_proto() when security_locked_down() returns an error.
That would also resolve (2.), basically. (Then there is the question
of what error code to use (because Lockdown LSM uses -EPERM, while
SELinux -EACCESS), but I think always returning -EPERM from such stub
helpers would be a viable choice.)

-- 
Ondrej Mosnacek
Software Engineer, Linux Security - SELinux kernel
Red Hat, Inc.