Re: [PATCH ghak90 V6 05/10] audit: add contid support for signalling the audit daemon

Paul Moore
2019-04-09T14:08:51Z

On Tue, Apr 9, 2019 at 9:53 AM Richard Guy Briggs <rgb@redhat.com> wrote:
> On 2019-04-09 09:40, Paul Moore wrote:
> > On Tue, Apr 9, 2019 at 8:58 AM Ondrej Mosnacek <omosnace@redhat.com> wrote:
> > > On Tue, Apr 9, 2019 at 5:40 AM Richard Guy Briggs <rgb@redhat.com> wrote:
> > > > Add audit container identifier support to the action of signalling the
> > > > audit daemon.
> > > >
> > > > Since this would need to add an element to the audit_sig_info struct,
> > > > a new record type AUDIT_SIGNAL_INFO2 was created with a new
> > > > audit_sig_info2 struct. Corresponding support is required in the
> > > > userspace code to reflect the new record request and reply type.
> > > > An older userspace won't break since it won't know to request this
> > > > record type.
> > > >
> > > > Signed-off-by: Richard Guy Briggs <rgb@redhat.com>
> > >
> > > This looks good to me.
> > >
> > > Reviewed-by: Ondrej Mosnacek <omosnace@redhat.com>
> > >
> > > Although I'm wondering if we shouldn't try to future-proof the
> > > AUDIT_SIGNAL_INFO2 format somehow, so that we don't need to add
> > > another AUDIT_SIGNAL_INFO3 when the need arises to add yet-another
> > > identifier to it... The simplest solution I can come up with is to add
> > > a "version" field at the beginning (set to 2 initially), then v<N>_len
> > > at the beginning of data for version <N>. But maybe this is too
> > > complicated for too little gain...
> >
> > FWIW, I believe the long term solution to this is the fabled netlink
> > attribute approach that we haven't talked about in some time, but I
> > keep dreaming about (it has been mostly on the back burner becasue 1)
> > time and 2) didn't want to impact the audit container ID work). While
> > I'm not opposed to trying to make things like this a bit more robust
> > by adding version fields and similar things, there are still so many
> > (so very many) problems with the audit kernel/userspace interface that
> > still need to be addressed.
>
> While this particular message type is used very infrequently, adding a
> version field to every message type strikes me as a huge overhead for
> the small likelihood of the format needing to change.
>
> I'd prefer to just key it off the AUDIT_FEATURE_BITMAP or some other
> easily detectable change in this distinguishing feature, such as the
> presence of /proc/self/audit_containerid, which is what I've done in the
> accompanying userspace patchset that I'm preparing to post that works
> with this change.

That's fine. As I said, I'm not overly worried about this; I view
this as a bit of a necessary hack.

--
paul moore