Re: [PATCH net-next] tun: fix group permission check

[Willem de Bruijn <willemdebruijn.kernel@gmail.com>]

Stas Sergeev wrote:
> Currently tun checks the group permission even if the user have matched.
> Besides going against the usual permission semantic, this has a
> very interesting implication: if the tun group is not among the
> supplementary groups of the tun user, then effectively no one can
> access the tun device. CAP_SYS_ADMIN still can, but its the same as
> not setting the tun ownership.
> 
> This patch relaxes the group checking so that either the user match
> or the group match is enough. This avoids the situation when no one
> can access the device even though the ownership is properly set.
> 
> Also I simplified the logic by removing the redundant inversions:
> tun_not_capable() --> !tun_capable()
> 
> Signed-off-by: Stas Sergeev <stsp2@yandex.ru>

This behavior goes back through many patches to commit 8c644623fe7e:

    [NET]: Allow group ownership of TUN/TAP devices.

    Introduce a new syscall TUNSETGROUP for group ownership setting of tap
    devices. The user now is allowed to send packages if either his euid or
    his egid matches the one specified via tunctl (via -u or -g
    respecitvely). If both, gid and uid, are set via tunctl, both have to
    match.

The choice evidently was on purpose. Even if indeed non-standard.