From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Serge E. Hallyn" Subject: Re: unprivileged mounts git tree Date: Thu, 4 Sep 2008 08:28:04 -0500 Message-ID: <20080904132804.GA14709@us.ibm.com> References: <20080808002537.GA5364@us.ibm.com> <20080827153628.GA11242@us.ibm.com> <20080827184600.GA8069@us.ibm.com> <20080903220215.GA27705@us.ibm.com> <20080903224334.GA726@us.ibm.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Cc: ebiederm@xmission.com, akpm@linux-foundation.org, hch@infradead.org, viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org To: Miklos Szeredi Return-path: Received: from e6.ny.us.ibm.com ([32.97.182.146]:48549 "EHLO e6.ny.us.ibm.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1750899AbYIDN21 (ORCPT ); Thu, 4 Sep 2008 09:28:27 -0400 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: Sender: linux-fsdevel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: Quoting Miklos Szeredi (miklos@szeredi.hu): > On Wed, 3 Sep 2008, Serge E. Hallyn wrote: > > Quoting Miklos Szeredi (miklos@szeredi.hu): > > > On Wed, 3 Sep 2008, Serge E. Hallyn wrote: > > > > Ooh. > > > > > > > > You predicate the turning of shared mount to a slave mount on > > > > !capable(CAP_SYS_ADMIN). But in fact it's the mount by a privileged > > > > user, turning the mount into a user mount, which you want to convert. > > > > So my series of steps was: > > > > > > > > as root: > > > > (1) mount --bind /mnt /mnt > > > > (2) mount --make-rshared /mnt > > > > (3) /usr/src/mmount-0.3/mmount --bind -o user=hallyn /mnt \ > > > > /home/hallyn/etc/mnt > > > > as hallyn: > > > > (4) mount --bind /usr /home/hallyn/etc/mnt/usr > > > > > > > > You are turning mounts from shared->slave at step 4, but in fact we need > > > > to do it at step 3, where we do have CAP_SYS_ADMIN. > > > > > > Well, that's arguable: I think root should be able to shoot itself in > > > the foot by doing step 3. > > > > Maybe I'm not thinking right, but long-term is there any reason why we > > should require privilege in order to do step 3, so long as the user has > > read access to the source and write access to the destination? > > > > I don't think there is. Other than this glitch. That's a powerful > > reason to fix the glitch. > > Agreed, without privileges it's unacceptable to allow step 3 as is. > > > The other argument is that, frankly, I think most people are still > > either unaware of, or confused by, mounts propagation. Letting root > > shoot himself in the foot is reasonable only to a point. > > Hmm, I think there are infinite ways in which root can mess up mount > propagation, and this is not even the worst. I'm not trying to > belittle this bug: done unprivileged it's unacceptable. But with > privileges, I really don't know if we should change the propagation > semantics for this corner case, they are complicated enough already. > > > > Generally we don't restrict what root can > > > do. OTOH I agree that current behavior is ugly in that it provides > > > different semantics for privileged/non-privileged callers. > > > > > > Perhaps it would be cleaner to simply not allow step 4, instead of > > > playing tricks with changing the propagation type. > > > > If the user or admin can simply (I haven't tested) > > > > mmount --bind --make-rslave -o user=hallyn /mnt \ > > /home/hallyn/etc/mnt > > > > then returning -EPERM if --make-rslave was not provided is reasonable > > IMO. > > Right, that sounds perfect. the only problem is, bind mount currently > ignores the propagation flags, for no good reason I can see. > > That's a separate patch though. I'll look into it. > > Thanks, > Miklos Cool, thanks, Miklos :) Are you going to revert the change forcing CL_SLAVE for !capable(CAP_SYS_ADMIN)? I don't think we want that - I think that *within* a set of user mounts, propagation should be safe, right? Will you be able to do this soon? If not, should we just do the part returning -EPERM when turning a shared mount into a user mount? Because I think that would then be ready for testing in -mm, and would love to see it tested. Were you going to push a patch to mount to do the user mounts, or put sample code in Documentation, git log, or under samples/? thanks, -serge