Re: [PATCH v4 16/16] ima: Setup securityfs for IMA namespace

James Bottomley
2021-12-08T14:11:13Z

On Wed, 2021-12-08 at 13:58 +0100, Christian Brauner wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 07, 2021 at 03:21:27PM -0500, Stefan Berger wrote:
[...]
> > @@ -69,6 +74,11 @@ static int securityfs_init_fs_context(struct
> > fs_context *fc)
> >
> > static void securityfs_kill_super(struct super_block *sb)
> > {
> > + struct user_namespace *ns = sb->s_fs_info;
> > +
> > + if (ns != &init_user_ns)
> > + ima_fs_ns_free_dentries(ns);
>
> Say securityfs is unmounted. Then all the inodes and dentries become
> invalid. It's not allowed to hold on to any dentries or inodes after
> the super_block is shut down. So I just want to be sure that nothing
> in ima can access these dentries after securityfs is unmounted.
>
> To put it another way: why are they stored in struct ima_namespace in
> the first place? If you don't pin a filesystem when creating files or
> directories like you do for securityfs in init_ima_ns then you don't
> need to hold on to them as they will be automatically be wiped during
> umount.

For IMA this is true because IMA can't be a module. However, a modular
consumer, like the TPM, must be able to remove its entries from a
mounted securityfs because the code that serves the operations is going
away. In order to do this removal, it needs the dentries somewhere.
The current convention seems to be everything has a directory in the
top level, so we could call d_genocide() on this directory and not have
to worry about storing the dentries underneath, but I think we can't
avoid storing the dentry for the top level directory.

James