On Sun, Jun 09, 2024 at 03:43:33AM -0700, Jonathan Calmels wrote:
This patch series introduces a new user namespace capability set, as well as some plumbing around it (i.e. sysctl, secbit, lsm support).
First patch goes over the motivations for this as well as prior art.
In summary, while user namespaces are a great success today in that they avoid running a lot of code as root, they also expand the attack surface of the kernel substantially which is often abused by attackers. Methods exist to limit the creation of such namespaces [1], however, application developers often need to assume that user namespaces are available for various tasks such as sandboxing. Thus, instead of restricting the creation of user namespaces, we offer ways for userspace to limit the capabilities granted to them.
Why a new capability set and not something specific to the userns (e.g. ioctl_ns)?
1. We can't really expect userspace to patch every single callsite and opt-in this new security mechanism. 2. We don't necessarily want policies enforced at said callsites. For example a service like systemd-machined or a PAM session need to be able to place restrictions on any namespace spawned under it. 3. We would need to come up with inheritance rules, querying capabilities, etc. At this point we're just reinventing capability sets. 4. We can easily define interactions between capability sets, thus helping with adoption (patch 2 is an example of this)Some examples of how this could be leveraged in userspace:
- Prevent user from getting CAP_NET_ADMIN in user namespaces under SSH: echo "auth optional pam_cap.so" >> /etc/pam.d/sshd echo "!cap_net_admin $USER" >> /etc/security/capability.conf capsh --secbits=$((1 << 8)) -- -c /usr/sbin/sshd - Prevent containers from ever getting CAP_DAC_OVERRIDE: systemd-run -p CapabilityBoundingSet=~CAP_DAC_OVERRIDE \ -p SecureBits=userns-strict-caps \ /usr/bin/dockerd systemd-run -p UserNSCapabilities=~CAP_DAC_OVERRIDE \ /usr/bin/incusd - Kernel could be vulnerable to CAP_SYS_RAWIO exploits, prevent it: sysctl -w cap_bound_userns_mask=0x1fffffdffff - Drop CAP_SYS_ADMIN for this shell and all the user namespaces below it: bwrap --unshare-user --cap-drop CAP_SYS_ADMIN /bin/sh
Where are the tests for this patchset? I see you updated the bpf tests for the bpf lsm bits, but there's nothing to validate this new behavior or exercise the new ioctl you've added. Thanks,
Josef