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

Jürg Billeter
2017-10-08T17:48:02Z

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.

Jürg