Re: [PATCH] exec: Make suid_dumpable apply to SUID/SGID binaries irrespective of invoking users

Waiman Long
2021-12-21T19:27:56Z

On 12/21/21 13:19, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 21, 2021 at 10:01 AM Waiman Long <longman@redhat.com> wrote:
>> Default RLIMIT_CORE to 0 will likely mitigate this vulnerability.
>> However, there are still some userspace impacts as existing behavior
>> will be modified. For instance, we may need to modify su to restore a
>> proper value for RLIMIT_CORE after successful authentication.
> We had a "clever" idea for this that I thought people were ok with.
>
> It's been some time since this came up, but iirc the notion was to
> instead of setting the rlimit to zero (which makes it really hard to
> restore afterwards, because you don't know what the restored value
> would be, so you are dependent on user space doing it), we just never
> reset set_dumpable() when we execve.
>
> So any suid exec will do set_dumpable() to suid_dumpable, and exec'ing
> something else does nothing at all - it stays non-dumpable (obviously
> "non-dumpable" here depends on the actual value for "suid_dumpable" -
> you can enable suid dump debugging manually).
>
> And instead, we say that operations like "setsid()" that start a new
> session - *those* are the ones that enable core dumping again. Or
> doing things like a "ulimit(RLIMIT_CORE)" (which clearly implies "I
> want core-dumps").
>
> Those will all very naturally make "login" and friends work correctly,
> while keeping core-dumps disabled for some suid situation that doesn't
> explicitly set up a new context.
>
> I think the basic problem with the traditional UNIX model of "suid
> exec doesn't core dump" is that the "enter non-core-dump" is a nice
> clear "your privileges changed".
>
> But then the "exit non-core-dump" thing is an exec that *doesn't*
> change privileges. That's the odd and crazy part: you just disabled
> core-dumps because there was a privilege level change, and then you
> enable core-dumps again because there *wasn't* a privilege change -
> even if you're still at those elevated privileges.
>
> Now, this is clearly not a Linux issue - we're just doing what others
> have been doing too. But I think we should just admit that "what
> others have been doing" is simply broken.
>
> And yes, some odd situation migth be broken by this kind of change,
> but I think this kind of "the old model was broken" may simply require
> that. I suspect we can find a solution that fixes all the regular
> cases.
>
> Hmm?

I think this is a pretty clever idea. At least it is better than
resetting RLIMIT_CORE to 0. As it is all done within the kernel, there
is no need to change any userspace code. We may need to add a flag bit
in the task structure to indicate using the suid_dumpable setting so
that it can be inherited across fork/exec.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Cheers,
Longman