On Mon, Nov 6, 2017 at 5:14 PM, Serge E. Hallyn [off-list ref] wrote:

Quoting Daniel Micay (danielmicay@gmail.com):

quoted

Substantial added attack surface will never go away as a problem. There
aren't a finite number of vulnerabilities to be found.

There's varying levels of usefulness and quality.  There is code which I
want to be able to use in a container, and code which I can't ever see a
reason for using there.  The latter, especially if it's also in a
staging driver, would be nice to have a toggle to disable.

You're not advocating dropping the added attack surface, only adding a
way of dealing with an 0day after the fact.  Privilege raising 0days can
exist anywhere, not just in code which only root in a user namespace can
exercise.  So from that point of view, ksplice seems a more complete
solution.  Why not just actually fix the bad code block when we know
about it?

Finally, it has been well argued that you can gain many new caps from
having only a few others.  Given that, how could you ever be sure that,
if an 0day is found which allows root in a user ns to abuse
CAP_NET_ADMIN against the host, just keeping CAP_NET_ADMIN from them
would suffice?  It seems to me that the existing control in
/proc/sys/kernel/unprivileged_userns_clone might be the better duct tape
in that case.

-serge

This seems to be heading toward "we need full zones in Linux" with
their own procfs and sysfs namespace and a stricter isolation model
for resources and capabilities. So long as things can happen in a
namespace which have a privileged relationship with host resources,
this is going to be cat-and-mouse to one degree or another.

Containers and namespaces dont have a one-to-one relationship, so i'm
not sure that's the best term to use in the kernel security context
since there's a bunch of userspace and implementation delta across the
different systems (with their own security models and so forth).
Without accounting for what a specific implementation may or may not
do, and only looking at "how do we reduce privileged impact on parent
context from unprivileged namespaces," this patch does seem to provide
a logical way of reducing the privileges available in such a namespace
and often needed to mount escapes/impact parent context.

-Boris

-- 
Boris Lukashev
Systems Architect
Semper Victus