Re: RFC(v2): Audit Kernel Container IDs

Paul Moore
2017-10-19T15:36:39Z

On Wed, Oct 18, 2017 at 8:43 PM, Eric W. Biederman
<ebiederm-aS9lmoZGLiVWk0Htik3J/w@public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Aleksa Sarai <asarai-l3A5Bk7waGM@public.gmane.org> writes:
>>>> The security implications are that anything that can change the label
>>>> could also hide itself and its doings from the audit system and thus
>>>> would be used as a means to evade detection. I actually think this
>>>> means the label should be write once (once you've set it, you can't
>>>> change it) ...
>>>
>>> Richard and I have talked about a write once approach, but the
>>> thinking was that you may want to allow a nested container
>>> orchestrator (Why? I don't know, but people always want to do the
>>> craziest things.) and a write-once policy makes that impossible. If
>>> we punt on the nested orchestrator, I believe we can seriously think
>>> about a write-once policy to simplify things.
>>
>> Nested containers are a very widely used use-case (see LXC system containers,
>> inside of which people run other container runtimes). So I would definitely
>> consider it something that "needs to be supported in some way". While the LXC
>> guys might be a *tad* crazy, the use-case isn't. :P

No worries, we're all a little crazy in our own special ways ;)

Kidding aside, thanks for explaining the use case.

> Of course some of that gets to running auditd inside a container which
> we don't have yet either.
>
> So I think to start it is perfectly fine to figure out the non-nested
> case first and what makes sense there. Then to sort out the nested
> container case.
>
> The solution might be that a process gets at most one id per ``audit
> namespace''.

In an attempt to stay on-topic, let's try to stick with "audit
container ID" or "container ID" if you must. I really want to avoid
the term "audit namespace" simply because the term "namespace" implies
some things which we aren't planning on doing.

--
paul moore