Re: Inconsistent capability requirements for prctl_set_mm_exe_file()

Cyrill Gorcunov
2020-10-27T12:51:59Z

On Tue, Oct 27, 2020 at 01:11:40PM +0100, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote:
> Hello Nicolas, Cyrill, and others,
>
> @Nicolas, your commit ebd6de6812387a changed the capability
> requirements for the prctl_set_mm_exe_file() operation from
>
> ns_capable(CAP_SYS_ADMIN)
>
> to
>
> ns_capable(CAP_SYS_ADMIN) || ns_capable(CAP_CHECKPOINT_RESTORE).
>
> That's fine I guess, but while looking at that change, I found
> an anomaly.
>
> The same prctl_set_mm_exe_file() functionality is also available
> via the prctl() PR_SET_MM_EXE_FILE operation, which was added
> by Cyrill's commit b32dfe377102ce668. However, there the
> prctl_set_mm_exe_file() operation is guarded by a check
>
> capable(CAP_SYS_RESOURCE).
>
> There are two things I note:
>
> * The capability requirements are different in the two cases.
> * In one case the checks are with ns_capable(), while in the
> other case the check is with capable().
>
> In both cases, the inconsistencies predate Nicolas's patch,
> and appear to have been introduced in Kirill Tkhai's commit
> 4d28df6152aa3ff.
>
> I'm not sure what is right, but those inconsistencies seem
> seem odd, and presumably unintended. Similarly, I'm not
> sure what fix, if any, should be applied. However, I thought
> it worth mentioning these details, since the situation is odd
> and surprising.

Hi Michael! This is more likely due to historical reasons:
the initial version of prctl(PR_SET_MM, ...) been operating
with individual fields and this was very unsafe. Because of
this we left it under CAP_SYS_RESOURCE (because you must have
enough rights to change such deep fields). Later we switched
to PR_SET_MM_MAP which is a safe version and allows to modify
memory map as a "whole" so we can do a precise check. And this
allowed us to relax requirements.

As to me the old PR_SET_MM should be deprecated and finally
removed from the kernel, but since it is a part of API we
can't do such thing easily.

Same time current PR_SET_MM internally is rather an alias
for PR_SET_MM_MAP because we create a temporary map and
pass it to the verification procedure so it looks like
we can relax requirements here to match the PR_SET_MM_MAP
call. But need to think maybe I miss something obvious here.