Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH for-1.7] seccomp: setting "-sandbox on" by default

[Paul Moore <pmoore@redhat.com>]

On Friday, November 22, 2013 11:39:31 AM Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 10:48:58AM -0500, Paul Moore wrote:
> > I'm always open to suggestions on how to improve the development/debugging
> > process, so if you have any ideas please let me know.
> 
> The failure mode is terrible:

Glad to see you don't feel strongly about things.

>   "The following fails to start here (the shell hangs and ps shows QEMU
>   is a <defunct> process)"
> 
> When a process dies the shell prints a warning.  That alerts the user
> and prompts them to take further steps.
> 
> Hanging the shell is a really bad way to fail.  We can't expect users to
> begin searching logs for audit failures.  They probably don't even know
> about audit or seccomp.

First things first, if a normal user hits a seccomp failure I consider it to 
be a bug, and to be honest, I've seen much nastier, much more subtle bugs than 
an inadvertent seccomp "death".  In a perfect world only developers would run 
into this problem and I would expect developers to be smart enough to figure 
out what is going on.

Getting past that, if seccomp is configured to kill the process when it 
violates the filter rules there isn't much else we can do; the kernel kills 
the process and then the rest of userspace, e.g. the shell/libvirt/etc., does 
whatever it does.  We have very little control over things.

> Is it possible to produce output when a seccomp violation takes place?

See the earlier comments from Eduardo about his attempts in this area.

-- 
paul moore
security and virtualization @ redhat