Re: [PATCH] Fix race condition when exec'ing setuid files

[Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>]

On Wed, Oct 05, 2022 at 01:09:36PM -0300, Jorge Merlino wrote:
> On 13/9/22 19:03, Kees Cook wrote:
> > I'll want to spend some more time studying this race, but yes, it looks
> > like it should get fixed. I'm curious, though, how did you find this
> > problem? It seems quite unusual to have a high-load heavily threaded
> > process decide to exec.
> 
> I just got a response from our customer regarding the situation where this
> race condition occurs:

Thanks for getting back details!

> Our application is a Rust-based CLI tool that acts as a frontend to
> cloud-based testing infrastructure. In one mode of operation it uploads a
> large number of test artifacts to cloud storage, spawns compute instances,
> and then starts a VPN connection to those instances. The application creates
> the VPN connection by executing another setuid-root tool as a subprocess. We
> see that this subprocess sometimes fails to setuid. The "high-load heavily
> threaded" aspect comes from the fact that we're using the Tokio runtime.
> Each upload to cloud storage is a separate Tokio task (i.e. "green thread")
> and these are scheduled onto "N" OS-level threads, where N = nproc. In a
> large run we may upload a couple thousand artifacts but limit to 50
> concurrent uploads. Once these artifact uploads complete, we typically spawn
> the setuid subprocess within 1-2 seconds.

Interesting. Seems like the execve might be racing all the threads
exiting?

> Have you been able to look at this issue?

I'll continue looking at this.

Dave, this tracks back to commit a6f76f23d297 ("CRED: Make execve() take
advantage of copy-on-write credentials") ... any ideas what's happening
here?

-- 
Kees Cook