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

Rafael J. Wysocki
2007-07-08T13:59:38Z

On Sunday, 8 July 2007 09:21, Miklos Szeredi wrote:
> > > > 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?
>
> What I'd like, is a suspend, that works reliably, regardless of the
> state of any userspace filesystem, network servers and such.

And then you also would like to have a consistent state of the system after
the resume, but if the state were inconsistent before the suspend that
would be difficult to get.

> > 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.
>
> Arbitrary time limits, nice. Not.
>
> This freezer is like an old house that's close to collapsing, and you
> are basically just thinking of where to prop it up further. To
> continute this brilliant analogy, Rafael's patch at least demolishes
> the worst part of the house, where bricks are already falling on our
> head ;)

Actually, this isn't correct and I have some testing problems with this
patch (as I expected, BTW), so it's not going anywhere. Alternative ideas
will be appreciated. :-)

> > Not ideal, but neither is allowing malicious filesystems in the first
> > place...
>
> Malicious programs are not something specific to fuse. A lot of the
> multiuser/multitasking OS design is about isolating things, so such a
> program is limited in the damage it can do.
>
> > > Look at it this way: the task of the freezer is to stop new I/O
> > > hitting the hardware. But it is totally indiscriminate about what it
> > > stops, it tries to stop _everything_ even things which have nothing to
> > > do with hardware.
> > >
> > > Not nice.
> >
> > Not nice, but we don't know any better for now. "Just fix all the
> > drivers" basically means "just fix 90% of kernel".
>
> And how much of that 90% currently has any power management?

Well, you know why that actually started to be a real problem? Because
sufficiently many people have started to use suspend/hibernation and it
actually works for quite a lot of them. This makes people to try exotic
combinations like suspend+FUSE and they find that doesn't work.

Greetings,
Rafael

--
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil." - Donald Knuth