On Thu, Jul 09, 2020 at 07:26:18PM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 7:50 PM Mickaël Salaün mic@digikod.net wrote:
On 08/07/2020 15:49, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 3:04 PM Mickaël Salaün mic@digikod.net wrote:
On 08/07/2020 10:57, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
On Tue, Jul 7, 2020 at 8:10 PM Mickaël Salaün mic@digikod.net wrote:
It looks like all you need here today is a single argument bit, plus possibly some room for extensibility. I would suggest removing all the extra bits and using a syscall like
SYSCALL_DEFINE1(landlock_create_ruleset, u32, flags);
I don't really see how this needs any variable-length arguments, it really doesn't do much.
We need the attr_ptr/attr_size pattern because the number of ruleset properties will increase (e.g. network access mask).
But how many bits do you think you will *actually* need in total that this needs to be a two-dimensional set of flags? At the moment you only have a single bit that you interpret.
I think there is a misunderstanding. For this syscall I wasn't talking about the "options" field but about the "handled_access_fs" field which has 14 bits dedicated to control access to the file system: https://landlock.io/linux-doc/landlock-v19/security/landlock/user.html#files...
Ok, got it. I didn't read far enough there.
The idea is to add other handled_access_* fields for other kernel object types (e.g. network, process, etc.).
The "options" field is fine as a raw __u32 syscall argument.
I'd still like to avoid having it variable-length and structured though. How about having a __u32 "options" flag, plus an indirect argument with 32 fixed-length (all 32 bit or all 64 bit) flag words, each of which corresponds to one of the option bits?
It's still fairly complex that way, but not as much as the version you have right now that can be extended in multiple dimensions.
This could possibly also help avoid the need for the get_features
What is this fresh hell again, please?
syscall: If user space just passes the bitmap of all the access flags it wants to use in a fixed-size structure, the kernel can update the bits to mask out the ones it does not understand and write back that bitmap as the result of create_ruleset().
To be on the safe side, you might split up the flags into either the upper/lower 16 bits or two u32 arguments, to allow both compatible (ignored by older kernels if flag is set) and incompatible (return error when an unknown flag is set) bits.
This may be a good idea in general, but in the case of Landlock, because this kind of (discretionary) sandboxing should be a best-effort security feature, we should avoid incompatible behavior. In practice, every unknown bit returns an error because userland can probe for available bits thanks to the get_features command. This kind of (in)compatibility can then be handled by userland.
If there are not going to be incompatible extensions, then just ignore all unknown bits and never return an error but get rid of the user space probing that just complicates the interface.
There was multiple discussions about ABI compatibility, especially inspired by open(2) vs. openat2(2), and ignoring flags seems to be a bad idea. In the "sandboxer" example, we first probe the supported features and then mask unknown bits (i.e. access rights) at run time in userland. This strategy is quite straightforward, backward compatible and future-proof.
For behavior changing flags, I agree they should be seen as incompatible flags (i.e. return an error if an unknown bit is set).
However, for the flags you pass in in an allowlist, treating them as compatible (i.e. ignore any unknown flags, allowing everything you are not forbidding already) seems completely reasonable to me. Do you foresee user space doing anything other than masking out the bits that the kernel doesn't know about? If not, then doing it in the kernel should always be simpler.
I suggest this syscall signature: SYSCALL_DEFINE3(landlock_create_ruleset, __u32, options, const struct landlock_attr_ruleset __user *, ruleset_ptr, size_t, ruleset_size);
The other problem here is that indirect variable-size structured arguments are a pain to instrument with things like strace or seccomp, so you should first try to use a fixed argument list, and fall back to a fixed structure if that fails.
I agree that it is not perfect with the current tools but this kind of extensible structs are becoming common and well defined (e.g. openat2). Moreover there is some work going on for seccomp to support "extensible argument" syscalls: https://lwn.net/Articles/822256/
openat2() is already more complex than we'd ideally want, I think we should try hard to make new syscalls simpler than that, following the rule that any interface should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.
Extensible structs are targeted at system calls that are either known to grow a lot of features or we already have prior versions that have accumulated quite a lot of features or that by their nature need to be more complex. openat2() is not really complex per se (At least not yet. It will likely grow quite a bit in the future...). The kernel now has infrastructure since clone3() and later generalized with openat2() and is well-equipped with a consistent api to deal with such syscalls so I don't see how this is really an issue in the first place. Yes, syscalls should be kept as simple as possible but we don't need to lock us into a "structs as arguments" are inherently bad mindset. That will also cause us to end up with crappy syscalls that are awkward to use for userspace. (Second-level pointers is a whole different issue of course.)
(Arnd, you should also note that we're giving a talk at kernel summit about new syscall conventions and I'm syncing with Florian who'll be talking about the userspace side and requirements of this.)
Christian
+static int syscall_add_rule_path_beneath(const void __user *const attr_ptr,
const size_t attr_size)+{
struct landlock_attr_path_beneath attr_path_beneath;struct path path;struct landlock_ruleset *ruleset;int err;Similarly, it looks like this wants to be
SYSCALL_DEFINE3(landlock_add_rule_path_beneath, int, ruleset, int, path, __u32, flags)
I don't see any need to extend this in a way that wouldn't already be served better by adding another system call. You might argue that 'flags' and 'allowed_access' could be separate, with the latter being an indirect in/out argument here, like
SYSCALL_DEFINE4(landlock_add_rule_path_beneath, int, ruleset, int, path, __u64 *, allowed_acces, __u32, flags)
To avoid adding a new syscall for each new rule type (e.g. path_beneath, path_range, net_ipv4_range, etc.), I think it would be better to keep the attr_ptr/attr_size pattern and to explicitely set a dedicated option flag to specify the attr type.
This would look like this: SYSCALL_DEFINE4(landlock_add_rule, __u32, options, int, ruleset, const void __user *, rule_ptr, size_t, rule_size);
The rule_ptr could then point to multiple types like struct landlock_attr_path_beneath (without the current ruleset_fd field).
This again introduces variable-sized structured data. How many different kinds of rule types do you think there will be (most likely, and maybe an upper bound)?
I don't know how many rule types will come, but right now I think it may be less than 10.
Ok,
Could (some of) these be generalized to use the same data structure?
I don't think so, file path and network addresses are an example of very different types.
Clearly the target object is something different, but maybe there is enough commonality to still make them fit into a more regular form.
For the file system case, you have an identify for an object (the file descriptor) and the '__u64 allowed_access'. I would expect that the 'allowed_access' concept is generic enough that you can make it a direct argument (32 bit register arg, or pointer to a __u64). Do you expect others to need something besides an object identifier and a permission bitmask? Maybe it could be something like
SYSCALL_DEFINE4(landlock_add_rule, int, ruleset, __u32, options, const void __user *, object, const __u64 __user *, allowed_access, __u32, flags);
with a fixed-length 'object' identifier type (file descriptor, sockaddr_storage, ...) for each option.
Arnd