Re: [CFT][PATCH] userns: Avoid problems with negative groups

Andy Lutomirski
2014-11-28T15:12:16Z

On Thu, Nov 27, 2014 at 9:21 PM, Eric W. Biederman
<ebiederm@xmission.com> wrote:
> Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net> writes:
>
>>> This change should break userspace by the minimal amount needed
>>> to fix this issue.
>>>
>>> This should fix CVE-2014-8989.
>>
>> I think this is both unnecessarily restrictive and that it doesn't fix
>> the bug.
>
> You are going to have to work very hard to convince me this is
> unnecessarily restrictive.
>
>>For example, I can exploit CVE-2014-8989 without ever
>> writing a uid map or a gid map.
>
> Yes. I realized just after I sent the patch that setgroups(0, NULL)
> would still work without a mapping set. That is a first glass grade a
> oversight that resulted in a bug. None of the other uid or gid changing
> syscalls without a mapping set, and setgroups was just overlooked
> because it was different. Oops.
>
> I will send an updated patch that stops setgroups from working without
> a mapping set shortly.
>
>> IIUC, the only real issue is that user namespaces allow groups to be
>> dropped using setgroups that wouldn't otherwise be dropped. Can we
>> get away with adding a per-user-ns flag that determines whether
>> setgroups can be used?
>
> Being able to call setgroups is fundamental to login programs, and login
> programs are one of the things user namespaces need to support. So
> adding an extra flag and an extra place where privilege is required
> is just noise, and will wind up breaking every user of user namespaces.
>
> Further being able to setup uid and gid mappings without privilege is
> primarily a nice to have. The original design did not have unprivileged
> setting of uid and gid maps and if it proves insecure I goofed and the
> feature isn't safe so it needs to be removed.

Being able to set a single-user uid map and gid map is very useful for
sandboxing. This lets unprivileged users drop filesystem and network
access and still run most normal programs. A surprising number of
normal unprivileged programs fail if run without a mapping.

>
> This does mean that running a system with negative groups and users
> delegated subordinate gids in /etc/subuid is a bad idea and system
> administrators shouldn't do that as those negative groups won't prove
> effective in stopping their users. But this is all under system
> administrator control so shrug. There isn't a way to avoid that
> fundamental conflict.
>
>> setgroups would be unusable until the gid_map has been written and
>> then it would become usable if and only if the parent userns could use
>> setgroups and the opener of gid_map was privileged.
>
> That proposal sounds a lot more restrictive and a lot more of a pain
> to use than what I have implemented in my patch.
>
>> If we wanted to allow finer-grained control, we could allow writing
>> control lines like:
>>
>> options +setgroups
>>
>> or
>>
>> options -setgroups
>>
>> in gid_map, or we could add user_ns_flags that can only be written
>> once and only before either uid_map or gid_map is written.
>
> Definitely more complicated and I can't imagine a case where I need
> a gid map without needing to call setgroups.

I do it all the time. Unshare, set mappings (with no inner uid 0 at
all), set no_new_privs, drop caps, and go.

Can we try the intermediate approach? If you set gid_map without
privilege and you have supplementary groups, then let the write to
gid_map succeed but prevent setgroups from ever working? That should
only be a couple of lines of code longer than your patch, and it will
avoid breaking sandbox use cases.

If we want to get really fancy in the future, we could have a concept
of pinned groups. That is, if you're in a userns and you're a member
of an unmapped group, then you can't drop that group. (Actually, that
all by itself might be enough to fix this issue.)

--Andy

>
> Eric

--
Andy Lutomirski
AMA Capital Management, LLC