Re: [PATCH v2 1/5] fs: Add support for an O_MAYEXEC flag on sys_open()

Tycho Andersen
2019-09-06T17:41:05Z

On Fri, Sep 06, 2019 at 07:20:51PM +0200, Christian Brauner wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 07, 2019 at 03:07:39AM +1000, Aleksa Sarai wrote:
> > On 2019-09-06, Mickaël Salaün <mickael.salaun@ssi.gouv.fr> wrote:
> > >
> > > On 06/09/2019 17:56, Florian Weimer wrote:
> > > > Let's assume I want to add support for this to the glibc dynamic loader,
> > > > while still being able to run on older kernels.
> > > >
> > > > Is it safe to try the open call first, with O_MAYEXEC, and if that fails
> > > > with EINVAL, try again without O_MAYEXEC?
> > >
> > > The kernel ignore unknown open(2) flags, so yes, it is safe even for
> > > older kernel to use O_MAYEXEC.
> >
> > Depends on your definition of "safe" -- a security feature that you will
> > silently not enable on older kernels doesn't sound super safe to me.
> > Unfortunately this is a limitation of open(2) that we cannot change --
> > which is why the openat2(2) proposal I've been posting gives -EINVAL for
> > unknown O_* flags.
> >
> > There is a way to probe for support (though unpleasant), by creating a
> > test O_MAYEXEC fd and then checking if the flag is present in
> > /proc/self/fdinfo/$n.
>
> Which Florian said they can't do for various reasons.
>
> It is a major painpoint if there's no easy way for userspace to probe
> for support. Especially if it's security related which usually means
> that you want to know whether this feature works or not.

What about just trying to violate the policy via fexecve() instead of
looking around in /proc? Still ugly, though.

Tycho