Re: Fw: [PATCH] proc: Update inode upon changing task security attribute

[Casey Schaufler <casey@schaufler-ca.com>]

On 12/8/2023 3:32 PM, Paul Moore wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 8, 2023 at 6:21 PM Casey Schaufler <casey@schaufler-ca.com> wrote:
>> On 12/8/2023 2:43 PM, Paul Moore wrote:
>>> On Thu, Dec 7, 2023 at 9:14 PM Munehisa Kamata <kamatam@amazon.com> wrote:
>>>> On Tue, 2023-12-05 14:21:51 -0800, Paul Moore wrote:
>>> ..
>>>
>>>>> I think my thoughts are neatly summarized by Andrew's "yuk!" comment
>>>>> at the top.  However, before we go too much further on this, can we
>>>>> get clarification that Casey was able to reproduce this on a stock
>>>>> upstream kernel?  Last I read in the other thread Casey wasn't seeing
>>>>> this problem on Linux v6.5.
>>>>>
>>>>> However, for the moment I'm going to assume this is a real problem, is
>>>>> there some reason why the existing pid_revalidate() code is not being
>>>>> called in the bind mount case?  From what I can see in the original
>>>>> problem report, the path walk seems to work okay when the file is
>>>>> accessed directly from /proc, but fails when done on the bind mount.
>>>>> Is there some problem with revalidating dentrys on bind mounts?
>>>> Hi Paul,
>>>>
>>>> https://lkml.kernel.org/linux-fsdevel/20090608201745.GO8633@ZenIV.linux.org.uk/
>>>>
>>>> After reading this thread, I have doubt about solving this in VFS.
>>>> Honestly, however, I'm not sure if it's entirely relevant today.
>>> Have you tried simply mounting proc a second time instead of using a bind mount?
>>>
>>>  % mount -t proc non /new/location/for/proc
>>>
>>> I ask because from your description it appears that proc does the
>>> right thing with respect to revalidation, it only becomes an issue
>>> when accessing proc through a bind mount.  Or did I misunderstand the
>>> problem?
>> It's not hard to make the problem go away by performing some simple
>> action. I was unable to reproduce the problem initially because I
>> checked the Smack label on the bind mounted proc entry before doing
>> the cat of it. The problem shows up if nothing happens to update the
>> inode.
> A good point.
>
> I'm kinda thinking we just leave things as-is, especially since the
> proposed fix isn't something anyone is really excited about.

"We have to compromise the performance of our sandboxing tool because of
a kernel bug that's known and for which a fix is available."

If this were just a curiosity that wasn't affecting real development I
might agree. But we've got a real world problem, and I don't see ignoring
it as a good approach. I can't see maintainers of other LSMs thinking so
if this were interfering with their users.