Re: [PATCH] capabilities: Introduce CAP_RESTORE

Andrei Vagin
2020-06-08T02:10:02Z

> >
> > I would argue that setting the current process exe file check should just be reduced to a "can you ptrace a children" check.
> > Here's why: any process can masquerade into another executable with ptrace.
> > One can fork a child, ptrace it, have the child execve("target_exe"), then replace its memory content with an arbitrary program.
>
> Then it should probably be relaxed to CAP_SYS_PTRACE in the user
> namespace and not CAP_CHECKPOINT_RESTORE. (But apparently you also have
> a way of achieving what you want anyway. Imho, it's not necessarily
> wrong to require a bit more work when you want something like fully
> unprivileged c/r that's a rather special interest group.)
>
> > With CRIU's libcompel parasite mechanism (https://criu.org/Compel) this is fairly easy to implement.
> > In fact, we could modify CRIU to do just that (but with a fair amount of efforts due to the way CRIU is written),
> > and not rely on being able to SET_MM_EXE_FILE via prctl(). In turn, that would give an easy way to masquerade any process
> > into another one, provided that one can ptrace a child.
> >

I think you misunderstand this. In the case of malicious processes,
when only one or two processes must be hidden, they can use this trick
with execve+ptrace and this is relatively simple. But in the case of
CRIU, where we need to restore a process tree with cow memory
mappings, shared mappings, file descriptors and etc, this trick with
execve+ptrace doesn't work at all. We are in a weird situation when
malicious processes can do some operations, but useful tools like CRIU
needed to be running with extra capabilities that actually reduces the
security of the entire system.