Re: [RESEND PATCH] prctl: add PR_[GS]ET_PDEATHSIG_PROC

Eric W. Biederman
2017-10-09T16:32:40Z

Jürg Billeter <j@bitron.ch> writes:

> On Thu, 2017-10-05 at 18:27 +0200, Oleg Nesterov wrote:
>> On 10/03, Jürg Billeter wrote:
>> >
>> > My use case is to provide a way for a process to spawn a child and
>> > ensure that no descendants survive when that child dies. Avoiding
>> > runaway processes is desirable in many situations. My motivation is
>> > very lightweight (nested) sandboxing (every process is potentially
>> > sandboxed).
>> >
>> > I.e., pid namespaces would be a pretty good fit (assuming they are
>> > sufficiently lightweight) but CLONE_NEWPID
>>
>> sorry if this was already discussed, I didn't read this thread yet...
>>
>> if CLONE_NEWPID is not suitable for any reason. We already have
>> PR_SET_CHILD_SUBREAPER. Perhaps we can simply add another
>> PR_SET_KILL_ALL_DESCEDANTS_ON_EXIT? we can use walk_process_tree()
>> to send SIGKILL.
>
> Yes, this is an option. However, after the discussion in this thread I
> believe it would be better to drop the CAP_SYS_ADMIN requirement for
> CLONE_NEWPID (when no_new_privs is set) as this would avoid adding
> another API and code path for a similar effect. I'm interested in
> possible security concerns about such a change. Adding Andy Lutomirski
> to cc.

Absolutely not. no_new_privs does not need the headache of being
increasing the kernel attack surface.

User namespaces are cheap, use one. Let the people using no_new_privs
sleep easy. We don't need to transform no_new_privs into a user namespace.

Eric