Thread (6 messages) 6 messages, 2 authors, 2019-09-09

Re: [PATCH v4 bpf-next 1/4] capability: introduce CAP_BPF and CAP_TRACING

From: Andy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org>
Date: 2019-09-09 22:52:42
Also in: bpf, linux-api, linux-security-module

On Fri, Sep 6, 2019 at 4:10 PM Alexei Starovoitov [off-list ref] wrote:
Split BPF and perf/tracing operations that are allowed under
CAP_SYS_ADMIN into corresponding CAP_BPF and CAP_TRACING.
For backward compatibility include them in CAP_SYS_ADMIN as well.

The end result provides simple safety model for applications that use BPF:
- for tracing program types
  BPF_PROG_TYPE_{KPROBE, TRACEPOINT, PERF_EVENT, RAW_TRACEPOINT, etc}
  use CAP_BPF and CAP_TRACING
- for networking program types
  BPF_PROG_TYPE_{SCHED_CLS, XDP, CGROUP_SKB, SK_SKB, etc}
  use CAP_BPF and CAP_NET_ADMIN

There are few exceptions from this simple rule:
- bpf_trace_printk() is allowed in networking programs, but it's using
  ftrace mechanism, hence this helper needs additional CAP_TRACING.
- cpumap is used by XDP programs. Currently it's kept under CAP_SYS_ADMIN,
  but could be relaxed to CAP_NET_ADMIN in the future.
- BPF_F_ZERO_SEED flag for hash/lru map is allowed under CAP_SYS_ADMIN only
  to discourage production use.
- BPF HW offload is allowed under CAP_SYS_ADMIN.
- cg_sysctl, cg_device, lirc program types are neither networking nor tracing.
  They can be loaded under CAP_BPF, but attach is allowed under CAP_NET_ADMIN.
  This will be cleaned up in the future.

userid=nobody + (CAP_TRACING | CAP_NET_ADMIN) + CAP_BPF is safer than
typical setup with userid=root and sudo by existing bpf applications.
It's not secure, since these capabilities:
- allow bpf progs access arbitrary memory
- let tasks access any bpf map
- let tasks attach/detach any bpf prog

bpftool, bpftrace, bcc tools binaries should not be installed with
cap_bpf+cap_tracing, since unpriv users will be able to read kernel secrets.

CAP_BPF, CAP_NET_ADMIN, CAP_TRACING are roughly equal in terms of
damage they can make to the system.
Example:
CAP_NET_ADMIN can stop network traffic. CAP_BPF can write into map
and if that map is used by firewall-like bpf prog the network traffic
may stop.
CAP_BPF allows many bpf prog_load commands in parallel. The verifier
may consume large amount of memory and significantly slow down the system.
CAP_TRACING allows many kprobes that can slow down the system.
Do we want to split CAP_TRACE_KERNEL and CAP_TRACE_USER?  It's not
entirely clear to me that it's useful.
quoted hunk ↗ jump to hunk
In the future more fine-grained bpf permissions may be added.

Existing unprivileged BPF operations are not affected.
In particular unprivileged users are allowed to load socket_filter and cg_skb
program types and to create array, hash, prog_array, map-in-map map types.

Signed-off-by: Alexei Starovoitov <ast@kernel.org>
---
 include/linux/capability.h          | 18 +++++++++++
 include/uapi/linux/capability.h     | 49 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-
 security/selinux/include/classmap.h |  4 +--
 3 files changed, 68 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)
diff --git a/include/linux/capability.h b/include/linux/capability.h
index ecce0f43c73a..13eb49c75797 100644
--- a/include/linux/capability.h
+++ b/include/linux/capability.h
@@ -247,6 +247,24 @@ static inline bool ns_capable_setid(struct user_namespace *ns, int cap)
        return true;
 }
 #endif /* CONFIG_MULTIUSER */
+
+static inline bool capable_bpf(void)
+{
+       return capable(CAP_SYS_ADMIN) || capable(CAP_BPF);
+}
+static inline bool capable_tracing(void)
+{
+       return capable(CAP_SYS_ADMIN) || capable(CAP_TRACING);
+}
+static inline bool capable_bpf_tracing(void)
+{
+       return capable(CAP_SYS_ADMIN) || (capable(CAP_BPF) && capable(CAP_TRACING));
+}
+static inline bool capable_bpf_net_admin(void)
+{
+       return (capable(CAP_SYS_ADMIN) || capable(CAP_BPF)) && capable(CAP_NET_ADMIN);
+}
+
These helpers are all wrong, unfortunately, since they will produce
inappropriate audit events.  capable_bpf() should look more like this:

if (capable_noaudit(CAP_BPF))
  return capable(CAP_BPF);
if (capable_noaudit(CAP_SYS_ADMIN))
  return capable(CAP_SYS_ADMIN);

return capable(CAP_BPF);

James, etc: should there instead be new helpers to do this more
generically rather than going through the noaudit contortions?  My
code above is horrible.
Keyboard shortcuts
hback out one level
jnext message in thread
kprevious message in thread
ldrill in
Escclose help / fold thread tree
?toggle this help