Re: malicious filesystems (was Re: [linux-pm] Re: [PATCH] Remove process freezer from suspend to RAM pathway)

Miklos Szeredi
2007-07-09T16:20:07Z

> > > We can just wait for all fuse requests to be serviced before
> > > proceeding further with freeze, right?
> >
> > Right. Nice way to slow down or stop the suspend with an unprivileged
> > process. Avoiding that sort of DoS is one of the design goals of
> > fuse.
>
> So you want me to handle _malicious_ filesystems now?
>
> That should be easy... :-). You already have nasty deadlocks in FUSE,
> and you solve them by "root can echo 1 > abort"... so allow me the
> same possibility.
>
> We can tell fused we are freezing, and if all the requests are not
> serviced within, say, 30 seconds, we call the filesystem malicious and
> do echo 1 > abort.
>
> Not ideal, but neither is allowing malicious filesystems in the first
> place...

Actually there's also a non-malicious case in which waiting for
requests to finish won't work: when one fuse filesystem is accessing
another.

Since we are blocking new fuse requests, that might block a fuse
daemon, which in turn makes it impossible to finish the pending
request.

And this is not at all theoretical, I know that encfs is used over
various other fuse filesystems like sshfs or ntfs-3g.

Yeah, stacking userspace filesystems could be done entirely in
userspace, and I'm actually working on that (with fuse-2.7.0 already
supporting some basic stacking).

But the point is, that the "wait for fuse to quiescence" hack would
not work in todays environment.

Miklos