Re: [PATCHv2] exec: Fix a deadlock in ptrace

Jann Horn
2020-03-02T18:08:58Z

On Mon, Mar 2, 2020 at 6:43 PM <christian@brauner.io> wrote:
> On March 2, 2020 6:37:27 PM GMT+01:00, Jann Horn <jannh@google.com> wrote:
> >On Mon, Mar 2, 2020 at 6:01 PM Bernd Edlinger
> ><bernd.edlinger@hotmail.de> wrote:
> >> On 3/2/20 5:43 PM, Jann Horn wrote:
> >> > On Mon, Mar 2, 2020 at 5:19 PM Eric W. Biederman
> ><ebiederm@xmission.com> wrote:
[...]
> >> >> I am 99% convinced that the fix is to move cred_guard_mutex down.
> >> >
> >> > "move cred_guard_mutex down" as in "take it once we've already set
> >up
> >> > the new process, past the point of no return"?
> >> >
> >> >> Then right after we take cred_guard_mutex do:
> >> >> if (ptraced) {
> >> >> use_original_creds();
> >> >> }
> >> >>
> >> >> And call it a day.
> >> >>
> >> >> The details suck but I am 99% certain that would solve everyones
> >> >> problems, and not be too bad to audit either.
> >> >
> >> > Ah, hmm, that sounds like it'll work fine at least when no LSMs are
> >involved.
> >> >
> >> > SELinux normally doesn't do the execution-degrading thing, it just
> >> > blocks the execution completely - see their
> >selinux_bprm_set_creds()
> >> > hook. So I think they'd still need to set some state on the task
> >that
> >> > says "we're currently in the middle of an execution where the
> >target
> >> > task will run in context X", and then check against that in the
> >> > ptrace_may_access hook. Or I suppose they could just kill the task
> >> > near the end of execve, although that'd be kinda ugly.
> >> >
> >>
> >> We have current->in_execve for that, right?
> >> I think when the cred_guard_mutex is taken only in the critical
> >section,
> >> then PTRACE_ATTACH could take the guard_mutex, and look at
> >current->in_execve,
> >> and just return -EAGAIN in that case, right, everybody happy :)
> >
> >It's probably going to mean that things like strace will just randomly
> >fail to attach to processes if they happen to be in the middle of
> >execve... but I guess that works?
>
> That sounds like an acceptable outcome.
> We can at least risk it and if we regress
> revert or come up with the more complex
> solution suggested in another mail here?

Yeah, sounds reasonable, I guess.