Unprivileged filesystem mounts

Demi Marie Obenour
2025-03-11T02:20:07Z

People have stuff to get done. If you disallow unprivileged filesystem
mounts, they will just use sudo (or equivalent) instead. The problem is
not that users are mounting untrusted filesystems. The problem is that
mounting untrusted filesystems is unsafe.

Making untrusted filesystems safe to mount is the only solution that
lets users do what they actually need to do. That means either actually
fixing the filesystem code, or running it in a sufficiently tight
sandbox that vulnerabilities in it are of too low importance to matter.
libguestfs+FUSE is the most obvious way to do this, but the performance
might not be enough for distros to turn it on.

For ext4 and F2FS, if there is a vulnerability that can be exploited by
a malicious filesystem image, it is a verified boot bypass for Chrome OS
and Android, respectively. Verified boot is a security boundary for
both of them, so just forward syzbot reports to their respective
security teams and let them do the jobs they are paid to do.