Re: [PATCH 2/2] groups: Allow unprivileged processes to use setgroups to drop groups

Josh Triplett
2014-11-16T02:35:24Z

On November 15, 2014 6:05:11 PM PST, Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
>On Sat, Nov 15, 2014 at 12:20:42PM -0800, Josh Triplett wrote:
>> > However, sudoers seems to allow negative group matches. So maybe
>> > allowing this only with no_new_privs already set would make sense.
>>
>> Sigh, bad sudo. Sure, restricting this to no_new_privs only seems
>fine.
>> I'll do that in v2, and document that in the manpage.
>
>I've also seen use cases (generally back in the bad old days of big
>timesharing VAX 750's :-) where the system admin might assign someone
>to the "games-abusers" group, and then set /usr/games to mode 705
>root:games-abusers --- presumably because it's easier to add a few
>people to the deny list rather than having to add all of the EECS
>department to the games group minus the abusers.
>
>So arbitrarily anyone to drop groups from their supplemental group
>list will result in a change from both existing practice and legacy
>Unix systems, and it could potentially lead to a security exposure.

As Andy pointed out, you can already do that with a user namespace, for any case not involving a setuid or setgid (or otherwise privilege-gaining) program. And requiring no_new_privs handles that.

Given the combination of those two things, do you still see any problematic cases?

- Josh Triplett