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Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2008 01:58:37 +0300
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: oss-security@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: CVE Request (syslog-ng)
On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 11:06:53PM +0100, Andreas Ericsson wrote:
> The correct sequence is:
> chdir(jail_path);
> chroot(".");
That's a correct sequence, but not the only correct one.
> The chroot() call will fail if the directory no longer exists,
No. I'm not sure if this is required by any standard, by the behavior
I'm used to seeing is that the current directory for a process will sort
of continue to exist for that process despite of being removed. It will
be permanently removed in the filesystem when no process "holds" it -
much like an opened but unlinked file. (Obviously, the same is true
when a process holds an open fd for a directory.)
> Paranoid programs only accept absolute non-symlink paths to the jail
> and issue getcwd() after having entered it to make sure they ended up
> in the proper directory.
I find this ridiculous - a program can't possibly defend itself against
every kind of unsafe use by the sysadmin. If a program chooses to do
any sanity checking on the provided pathname, then a sane check would be
to ensure that all directories in the path are only writable by root.
Unfortunately, too many people (mostly "packagers", because they feel
the urge to "clean things up"?) are confused and they tend to make
directories to chroot into writable by the pseudo-user the service will
run as. (BTW, this is something distros could want to mass-audit their
patches, spec files, packaging scripts, etc. for. I expect that some
"bad" packages will be found if a few large distros do that.)
Speaking of the issue at hand, I generally prefer:
if (chroot(CHROOT_PATH) || chdir("/")) fail();
or it can be written as two separate if's for clarify or if different
error handling is needed in the two cases, although in C the second call
will only be made if the first one returns 0 so this construct is safe.
I think that this - chroot() first, chdir("/") right after it - should
be the idiom, whereas other ways to achieve the same effect are
allowable deviations.
Besides the missing chdir(), another very common issue with "privilege
dropping" programs is forgetting to drop or re-initialize supplementary
groups. Not checking return values from any of the functions involved
is about as common... (I have not checked syslog-ng for any of this.)
--
Alexander Peslyak <solar at openwall.com>
GPG key ID: 5B341F15 fp: B3FB 63F4 D7A3 BCCC 6F6E FC55 A2FC 027C 5B34 1F15
http://www.openwall.com - bringing security into open computing environments
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