Re: Creating executable device nodes in /dev?

[Jarkko Sakkinen <jarkko@kernel.org>]

On Tue, Dec 08, 2020 at 10:07:17AM -0800, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 19, 2020 at 10:05 AM Topi Miettinen <toiwoton@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 19.11.2020 18.32, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote:
> > > On Thu, Nov 19, 2020 at 08:17:08AM -0800, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> > >> Hi udev people-
> > >>
> > >> The upcoming Linux SGX driver has a device node /dev/sgx.  User code
> > >> opens it, does various setup things, mmaps it, and needs to be able to
> > >> create PROT_EXEC mappings.  This gets quite awkward if /dev is mounted
> > >> noexec.
> > >>
> > >> Can udev arrange to make a device node executable on distros that make
> > >> /dev noexec?  This could be done by bind-mounting from an exec tmpfs.
> > >> Alternatively, the kernel could probably learn to ignore noexec on
> > >> /dev/sgx, but that seems a little bit evil.
> > >
> > > I'd be inclined to simply drop noexec from /dev by default.
> > > We don't do noexec on either /tmp or /dev/shm (because that causes immediate
> > > problems with stuff like Java and cffi). And if you have those two at your
> > > disposal anyway, having noexec on /dev doesn't seem important.
> >
> > I'd propose to not enable exec globally, but if a service needs SGX, it
> > could use something like MountOptions=/dev:exec only in those cases
> > where it's needed. That way it's possible to disallow writable and
> > executable file systems for most services (which typically don't need
> > /tmp or /dev/shm either). Of course the opposite
> > (MountOptions=/dev:noexec) would be also possible, but I'd expect that
> > this would be needed to be used more often.
> >
> 
> I imagine the opposite would be more sensible.  It seems odd to me
> that we would want any SGX-using service to require both special mount
> options and regular ACL permissions.
> 
> As  a further argument, I just did this on a Fedora system:
> 
> $ find /dev -perm /ugo+x -a \! -type d -a \! -type l
> 
> No results.  So making /dev noexec doesn't seem to have any benefit.

Neither does my Ubuntu installation with '-xdev' added (because of
/dev/shm mount).

find /dev -xdev -perm /ugo+x -a \! -type d -a \! -type l

/Jarkko