Re: [Devel] Re: [patch 05/10] add "permit user mounts in new namespace" clone flag

Eric W. Biederman
2007-04-17T09:08:35Z

"Serge E. Hallyn" <serue@us.ibm.com> writes:
>>
>> Why are directory permissions not sufficient to allow/deny non-priveleged
> mounts?
>> I don't understand that contention yet.
>
> The same scenarios laid out previously in this thread. I.e.
>
> 1. user hallyn does mount --bind / /home/hallyn/root
> 2. (...)
> 3. admin does "deluser hallyn"
>
> and deluser starts wiping out root
>
> Or,
>
> 1. user hallyn does mount --bind / /home/hallyn/root
> 2. backup daemon starts backing up /home/hallyn/root/home/hallyn/root/home...
>
> So we started down the path of forcing users to clone a new namespace
> before doing user mounts, which is what the clone flag was about. Using
> per-mount flags also suffices as you had pointed out, which is being
> done here. But directory permissions are inadequate.

Interesting....

So far even today these things can happen, however they are sufficiently
unlikely the tools don't account for them.

Once a hostile user can cause them things are more of a problem.

> (Unless you want to tackle each problem legacy tool one at a time to
> remove problems - i.e. deluser should umount everything under
> /home/hallyn before deleting, backup should be spawned from it's own
> namespace cloned right after boot or just back up on one filesystem,
> etc.)

I don't see a way that backup and deluser won't need to be modified
to work properly in a system where non-priveleged mounts are allowed,
at least they will need to account for /share.

That said it is clearly a hazard if we enable this functionality by
default.

If we setup a pam module that triggers on login and perhaps when
cron and at jobs run to setup an additional mount namespace I think
keeping applications locked away in their own mount namespace is
sufficient to avoid hostile users from doing unexpected things to
the initial mount namespace. So unless I am mistake it should be
relatively simple to prevent user space from encountering problems.

That still leaves the question of how we handle systems with an old
user space that is insufficiently robust to deal with mounts occurring
at unexpected locations.

I think a simple sysctl to enable/disable of non-priveleged mounts
defaulting to disabled is enough.

Am I correct or will it be more difficult than just a little pam
module to ensure non-trusted users never run in the initial mount
namespace?

Eric