Re: ioctl CAP_LINUX_IMMUTABLE is checked in the wrong namespace

Andy Lutomirski
2014-04-29T23:08:12Z

On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 4:06 PM, Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 03:45:24PM -0700, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
>>
>> Wait, what?
>>
>> Inodes aren't owned by user namespaces; they're owned by users. And any
>> user can arrange to have a user namespace in which they pass an
>> inode_capable check on any inode that they own.
>>
>> Presumably there's a reason that CAP_SYS_IMMUTABLE is needed. If this
>> gets merged, then it would be better to just drop CAP_SYS_IMMUTABLE
>> entirely.
>>
>> Nacked-by: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>
>
> Right, but you can't set a mapping in a child namespace unless you
> have CAP_SETUID in the parent namespace, right?

Nope. You can't set a mapping for someone else's uid, but you can
certainly map your own.

> Otherwise user
> namespaces are completely broken from a security perspective, since
> inode_capable() could never do the right thing.

I don't know what inode_capable's "right thing" is, but at least one
of the existing callers is blatantly wrong. Patches coming shortly.

>
> Personally, reading how user namespaces work, it makes the hair rise
> on the back of my neck. I'm not sure the concept works at all from a
> security perspective, but hey, I'm not using user namespaces, and some
> fool thought it was worth merging. :-)

I like them. I've also found quite a few serious bugs in them. So go figure :)

--Andy