[PATCH 0/5] Security: Provide unioned file support

David Howells
2015-09-28T20:00:27Z

The attached patches provide security support for unioned files where the
security involves an object-label-based LSM (such as SELinux) rather than a
path-based LSM.

[Note that a number of the bits that were in the original patch set are now
upstream and I've rebased on Casey's changes to the security hook system]

The patches can be broken down into two sets:

(1) A patch to add LSM hooks to handle copy up of a file, including label
determination/setting and xattr filtration and a patch to have
overlayfs call the hooks during the copy-up procedure.

(2) My SELinux implementations of these hooks. I do three things:

(a) Don't copy up SELinux xattrs from the lower file to the upper
file. It is assumed that the upper file will be created with the
attrs we want or the selinux_inode_copy_up() hook will set it
appropriately.

The reason there are two separate hooks here is that
selinux_inode_copy_up_xattr() might not ever be called if there
aren't actually any xattrs on the lower inode.

(b) I try to derive a label to be used by file operations by, in order
of preference: using the label on the union inode if there is one
(the normal overlayfs case); using the override label set on the
superblock, if provided; or trying to derive a new label by sid
transition operation.

(c) Using the label obtained in (b) in file_has_perm() rather than
using the label on the lower inode.

Now the steps I have outlined in (b) and (c) seem to be at odds with what
Dan Walsh and Stephen Smalley want - but I'm not sure I follow what that
is, let alone how to do it:

Wanted to bring back the original proposal. Stephen suggested that
we could change back to the MLS way of handling labels.

In MCS we base the MCS label of content created by a process on the
containing directory. Which means that if a process running as
s0:c1,c2 creates content in a directory labeled s0, it will get
created as s0.

In MLS if a process running as s0:c1,c2 creates content in a
directory it labels it s0:c1,c2. No matter what the label of the
directory is. (Well actually if the directory is not ranged the
process will not be able to create the content.)

We changed the default for MCS in Rawhide for about a week, when I
realized this was a huge problem for containers sharing content.
Currently if you want two containers to share the same volume
mount, we label the content as svirt_sandbox_file_t:s0 If one
process running as s0:c1,c2 creates content it gets created as s0,
if the second container process is running as s0:c3,c4, it can
still read/write the content. If we changed the default the object
would get created as s0:c1,c2 and process runing as s0:c3,c4 would
be blocked.

So I had it reverted back to the standard MCS Mode.

If we could get the default to be MLS mode on COW file systems and
MCS on Volumes, we would get the best of both worlds.

The patches can be found here on top of some fix patches:

http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/dhowells/linux-fs.git/log/?h=overlayfs

David
---
David Howells (5):
Security: Provide copy-up security hooks for unioned files
Overlayfs: Use copy-up security hooks
SELinux: Stub in copy-up handling
SELinux: Handle opening of a unioned file
SELinux: Check against union label for file operations

fs/overlayfs/copy_up.c | 12 ++++
include/linux/lsm_hooks.h | 23 ++++++++
include/linux/security.h | 14 +++++
security/security.c | 17 ++++++
security/selinux/hooks.c | 101 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-
security/selinux/include/objsec.h | 1
6 files changed, 166 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)