Re: [PATCH 1/2] fork: add clone6

Kees Cook
2019-05-30T18:26:51Z

On Mon, May 27, 2019 at 09:36:18PM +0200, Jann Horn wrote:
> +Kees
>
> On Mon, May 27, 2019 at 9:27 PM Linus Torvalds
> <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
> > On Mon, May 27, 2019 at 3:42 AM Christian Brauner <christian@brauner.io> wrote:
> > > Hm, still pondering whether having one unsigned int argument passed
> > > through registers that captures all the flags from the old clone() would
> > > be a good idea.
> >
> > That sounds like a reasonable thing to do.
> >
> > Maybe we could continue to call the old flags CLONE_XYZ and continue
> > to pass them in as "flags" argument, and then we have CLONE_EXT_XYZ
> > flags for a new 64-bit flag field that comes in through memory in the
> > new clone_args thing?
>
> With the current seccomp model, that would have the unfortunate effect
> of making it impossible to filter out new clone flags - which would
> likely mean that people who want to sandbox their code would not use
> the new clone() because they don't want their sandboxed code to be
> able to create time namespaces and whatever other new fancy things
> clone() might support in the future. This is why I convinced Christian
> to pass flags in registers for the first patch version.
>
> The alternative I see would be to somehow extend seccomp to support
> argument structures that are passed in memory - that would probably
> require quite a bit of new plumbing though, both in the kernel and in
> userspace code that configures seccomp filters.

FWIW, the only path forward on this that I've been able to see is to
normalize how syscalls read memory from userspace, and to basically
provide a cache (i.e. copy from userspace once) that will be examined by
both seccomp and later kernel functions. I have not been able to imagine
an API that wasn't a massive amount of work to implement, though. Maybe
it could be done only for a few kinds of arguments (file paths, certain
structures, etc) but I haven't made any progress on it.

--
Kees Cook