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

Josh Triplett
2014-11-15T20:20:55Z

On Sat, Nov 15, 2014 at 12:06:20PM -0800, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 15, 2014 at 11:29 AM, Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org> wrote:
> > On Sat, Nov 15, 2014 at 09:37:27AM -0600, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> >> Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org> writes:
> >>
> >> > Currently, unprivileged processes (without CAP_SETGID) cannot call
> >> > setgroups at all. In particular, processes with a set of supplementary
> >> > groups cannot further drop permissions without obtaining elevated
> >> > permissions first.
> >> >
> >> > Allow unprivileged processes to call setgroups with a subset of their
> >> > current groups; only require CAP_SETGID to add a group the process does
> >> > not currently have.
> >>
> >> A couple of questions.
> >> - Is there precedence in other unix flavors for this?
> >
> > I found a few references to now-nonexistent pages at MIT about a system
> > with this property, but other than that no.
> >
> > I've also found more than a few references to people wanting this
> > functionality.
> >
> >> - What motiviates this change?
> >
> > I have a series of patches planned to add more ways to drop elevated
> > privileges without requiring a transition through root to do so. That
> > would improve the ability for unprivileged users to run programs
> > sandboxed with even *less* privileges. (Among other things, that would
> > also allow programs running with no_new_privs to further *reduce* their
> > privileges, which they can't currently do in this case.)
> >
> >> - Have you looked to see if anything might for bug compatibilty
> >> require applications not to be able to drop supplementary groups?
> >
> > I haven't found any such case; that doesn't mean such a case does not
> > exist. Feedback welcome.
> >
> > The only case I can think of (and I don't know of any examples of such a
> > system): some kind of quota system that limits the members of a group to
> > a certain amount of storage, but places no such limit on non-members.
> >
> > However, the idea of *holding* a credential (a supplementary group ID)
> > giving *less* privileges, and *dropping* a credential giving *more*
> > privileges, would completely invert normal security models. (The sane
> > way to design such a system would be to have a privileged group for
> > "users who can exceed the quota".)
>
> Agreed. And, if you want to bypass quotas by dropping a supplementary
> group, you already can by unsharing your user namespace.

Good point! Given that a process can run with a new user namespace and
no other namespaces, and then drop all its other privileges that way,
the ability to drop privileges without using a user namespace seems
completely harmless, with one exception that you noted:

> 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.

- Josh Triplett