Re: [PATCH 0/3] userfaultfd: allow to forbid unprivileged users

Andrea Arcangeli
2019-03-13T18:52:30Z

Hello,

On Wed, Mar 13, 2019 at 09:22:31AM +0100, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> On 13/03/19 07:00, Peter Xu wrote:
> >> However, I can imagine more special cases being added for other users. And,
> >> once you have more than one special case then you may want to combine them.
> >> For example, kvm and hugetlbfs together.
> > It looks fine to me if we're using MMF_USERFAULTFD_ALLOW flag upon
> > mm_struct, since that seems to be a very general flag that can be used
> > by anything we want to grant privilege for, not only KVM?
>
> Perhaps you can remove the fork() limitation, and add a new suboption to
> prctl(PR_SET_MM) that sets/resets MMF_USERFAULTFD_ALLOW. If somebody
> wants to forbid unprivileged userfaultfd and use KVM, they'll have to
> use libvirt or some other privileged management tool.
>
> We could also add support for this prctl to systemd, and then one could
> do "systemd-run -pAllowUserfaultfd=yes COMMAND".

systemd can already implement -pAllowUserfaultfd=no with seccomp if it
wants. It can also implement -yes if by default turns off userfaultfd
like firejail -seccomp would do.

If the end goal is to implement the filtering with an userland policy
instead of a kernel policy, seccomp enabled for all services sounds
reasonable. It's very unlikely you'll block only userfaultfd, firejail
-seccomp by default blocks dozen of syscalls that are unnecessary
99.9% of the time.

This is not about implementing an userland flexible policy, it's just
a simple kernel policy, to use until userland disables the kernel
policy to takeover with seccomp across the board.

I wouldn't like this too be too complicated because this is already
theoretically overlapping 100% with seccomp.

hugetlbfs is more complicated to detect, because even if you inherit
it from fork(), the services that mounts the fs may be in a different
container than the one that Oracle that uses userfaultfd later on down
the road from a different context. And I don't think it would be ok to
allow running userfaultfd just because you can open a file in an
hugetlbfs file system. With /dev/kvm it's a bit different, that's
chmod o-r by default.. no luser should be able to open it.

Unless somebody suggests a consistent way to make hugetlbfs "just
work" (like we could achieve clean with CRIU and KVM), I think Oracle
will need a one liner change in the Oracle setup to echo into that
file in addition of running the hugetlbfs mount.

Note that DPDK host bridge process will also need a one liner change
to do a dummy open/close of /dev/kvm to unblock the syscall.

Thanks,
Andrea