Re: [RFC PATCH bpf-next 00/13] bpf: Introduce BPF namespace

["Toke Høiland-Jørgensen" <toke@kernel.org>]

Yafang Shao <laoar.shao@gmail.com> writes:

> Currently only CAP_SYS_ADMIN can iterate BPF object IDs and convert IDs
> to FDs, that's intended for BPF's security model[1]. Not only does it
> prevent non-privilidged users from getting other users' bpf program, but
> also it prevents the user from iterating his own bpf objects.
>
> In container environment, some users want to run bpf programs in their
> containers. These users can run their bpf programs under CAP_BPF and
> some other specific CAPs, but they can't inspect their bpf programs in a
> generic way. For example, the bpftool can't be used as it requires
> CAP_SYS_ADMIN. That is very inconvenient.
>
> Without CAP_SYS_ADMIN, the only way to get the information of a bpf object
> which is not created by the process itself is with SCM_RIGHTS, that
> requires each processes which created bpf object has to implement a unix
> domain socket to share the fd of a bpf object between different
> processes, that is really trivial and troublesome.
>
> Hence we need a better mechanism to get bpf object info without
> CAP_SYS_ADMIN. 
>
> BPF namespace is introduced in this patchset with an attempt to remove 
> the CAP_SYS_ADMIN requirement. The user can create bpf map, prog and
> link in a specific bpf namespace, then these bpf objects will not be
> visible to the users in a different bpf namespace. But these bpf
> objects are visible to its parent bpf namespace, so the sys admin can 
> still iterate and inspect them.
>
> BPF namespace is similar to PID namespace, and the bpf objects are
> similar to tasks, so BPF namespace is very easy to understand. These
> patchset only implements BPF namespace for bpf map, prog and link. In the
> future we may extend it to other bpf objects like btf, bpffs and etc.

May? I think we should cover all of the existing BPF objects from the
beginning here, or we may miss important interactions that will
invalidate the whole idea. In particular, I'm a little worried about the
interaction between namespaces and bpffs; what happens if you're in a
bpf namespace and you try to read a BPF object from a bpffs that belongs
to a different namespace? Does the operation fail? Is the object hidden
entirely? Something else?

-Toke