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Date: Tue, 5 Dec 2017 11:13:50 +0100
From: Salvatore Mesoraca <s.mesoraca16@...il.com>
To: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
Cc: Kernel Hardening <kernel-hardening@...ts.openwall.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 0/2] Restrict dangerous open in sticky directories
2017-11-30 20:05 GMT+01:00 Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>:
> On Thu, Nov 30, 2017 at 03:37:29PM +0100, Salvatore Mesoraca wrote:
> > 2017-11-27 2:14 GMT+01:00 Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>:
> > > When I suggested the O_CREAT-without-O_EXCL checks, I didn't mean you'd
> > > try to introduce them at the same time with the restrictions on FIFOs
> > > and regular files. I think that bundling these together might be a
> > > recipe for never getting any of them in, or for getting in the latter
> > > with unnecessarily limited scope.
> >
> > Yes, I think you are right. I'll split them.
>
> Thanks.
>
> > > I think we need an optional policy
> > > against O_CREAT-without-O_EXCL not only for sticky directories, but also
> > > for other directories writable by other than the current fsuid - there
> > > may be several levels or individual flags here.
> > >
> > > So maybe unbundle these or at least avoid forever limiting them to
> > > sticky directories (don't include "sticky" in the sysctl name).
> >
> > Actually I never liked that sysctl name I'll try to come up with something
> > less ugly and that doesn't include the "sticky" word.
>
> So the current name is "protected_sticky_child_create" (I couldn't even
> recall it, had to look it up for this reply). This unnecessarily
> bundles this potentially more general policy stuff with the existing
> "protections" against specific attacks, unnecessarily limits scope to
> "sticky" and "create", and talks about some "child". How about we use
> something totally different, focusing on "policy"? It could be simply
> "policy" (we're already in "fs"), or if that won't fly then how about
> "security_policy" or "dac_policy"? We will be imposing extra
> restrictions on top of usual Unix discretionary access control
> permission bits while not going all the way to mandatory access control
> (not tying objects to subjects). So in a sense we'll have an extension
> of Unix DAC.
Yea, I like "dac_policy" very much.
> BTW, this and all of fs.protected* should be configurable per-container.
This would be a nice thing to do in the future.
> > If I implement something like what Matthew proposed[1] it will be easy to
> > extend scope and functionalities of this feature without complicating too much
> > the interface.
>
> > [1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/11/22/319
>
> Right. I tried thinking of a way to specify all reasonable combinations
> without the likely unreasonable ones, but couldn't come up with anything
> elegant. So I'm fine with Matthew's proposal as-is.
Great.
> A new thought: a directory that has someone else as its owner is for our
> purposes effectively the same as a group-writable directory. So maybe
> whatever we'll implement for group-writable directories should also be
> done for directories that have other than the current fsuid as their
> owner. It's currently very uncommon to have directories with the sticky
> bit set that are not at least group-writable, so this will rarely make a
> difference (and when it does, that's just right), but also it provides a
> way to explicitly include any directory under this monitoring (if the
> group-writable protection is on) - e.g., if a sysadmin wants this
> monitoring for users' home directories, they can change permissions for
> those from e.g. 700 to 1700. This could be handy for development and
> auditing of software, even though in production it could be easily
> circumvented by the directory owner (who can remove the sticky bit,
> which we should document to avoid providing a false sense of security)
> and it won't automatically apply to subdirectories. It'd also cover
> part of what we intend to achieve later by possibly extending the
> feature to non-sticky directories, where we might also want to treat
> different owner the same as group-writable (without the circumvention).
Agreed. I'll extend it to also check for the directory owner.
Maybe I could use another bit and make this additional restriction
independent from the "group-writable" one.
> > So, are you suggesting that I should extend "O_CREAT-without-O_EXCL"
> > and "FIFOs restrictions" to work (optionally) on non-sticky directories too,
> > while leaving untouched (for the moment) "normal files restrictions"?
>
> No, I think all of these and the existing symlink restrictions should
> potentially be extended "to work (optionally) on non-sticky directories
> too", but perhaps with separate patches later.
OK.
> An even further extension may be to cover non-O_CREAT: writing or/and
> reading an existing file in an untrusted directory is also potentially
> unsafe. Unfortunately, we can't reliably know whether the program
> possibly takes precautions by using lstat() and fstat() and comparing
> st_dev/st_ino, so we won't be able to distinguish likely unsafe and
> likely mostly safe accesses, but we'll be able to flag all of them for
> manual analysis on a developer's or an auditor's system. A reasonable
> strict policy one might want to follow is to have all accesses done as
> the right fsuid, without needing those unreliable st_dev/st_ino checks.
> (They're unreliable because of potential side-effects on open() and
> inode reuse.) For example, we chose this strict policy in Openwall's
> "tcb suite" and shadow suite patches: http://www.openwall.com/tcb/
>
> Of course, then there's the question on whether something exotic(?) like
> this should be in the kernel.
>
> To me, it's like a "gcc -Wall" for filesystem accesses. Sure it can
> "falsely" detect many technically valid uses, but it's also helpful to
> improve our filesystem access safety.
Yes, this could be a useful improvement for the future.
Salvatore
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