Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2013 22:03:01 +0000
From: "Serge E. Hallyn" <serge@hallyn.com>
To: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>
Cc: "Serge E. Hallyn" <serge@hallyn.com>, Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>,
        Serge Hallyn <serge.hallyn@ubuntu.com>,
        "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH RFC] allow some kernel filesystems to be mounted in a
 user namespace
Message-ID: <20130716220301.GA24223@mail.hallyn.com>
References: <20130716192920.GA8980@sergelap>
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 <20130716195002.GA23370@mail.hallyn.com>
 <51E5BC0D.3090303@mit.edu>
 <20130716213748.GA24076@mail.hallyn.com>
 <CALCETrV8QFZU947=OjL-abxAmHiLso-uhbmoJt45kfmtaw26Tg@mail.gmail.com>
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Quoting Andy Lutomirski (luto@amacapital.net):
> On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 2:37 PM, Serge E. Hallyn <serge@hallyn.com> wrote:
> > Quoting Andy Lutomirski (luto@amacapital.net):
> >> On 07/16/2013 12:50 PM, Serge E. Hallyn wrote:
> >> > Quoting Al Viro (viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk):
> >> >> On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 02:29:20PM -0500, Serge Hallyn wrote:
> >> >>> All the files will be owned by host root, so there's no security
> >> >>> concern in allowing this.
> >> >>
> >> >> Files owned by root != very bad things can't be done by non-root.
> >> >> Especially for debugfs, which is very much a "don't even think about
> >> >> mounting that on a production box" thing...
> >> >
> >> > I would prefer it not be mounted.  But near as I can tell there
> >> > should be no regression security-wise whether an unprivileged
> >> > user on the host has access to it, or whether a user in a
> >> > non-init user ns is allowed to mount it.  (Obviously I could very
> >> > well be wrong)
> >>
> >> I would argue that either (a) debugfs denies everything to non-root, so
> >> mounting it in a (rootless) userns is useless or (b) it doesn't, in
> >> which case it's dangerous.
> >>
> >> In neither case does it make sense to me to allow the mount.
> >
> > It makes sense from the POV of having sane user-space.  I can obviously
> > work around this by tweaking a stock container rootfs to be different
> > from a stock host rootfs.  It is undesirable.
> >
> > For debug and fusectl there is another option which I'm happy to
> > pursue, namely tweaking how mountall handles 'nofail' to ignore these
> > errors.
> 
> I don't know enough about fuse to know whether it should work in a
> container, but presumably the fusectl FS needs to be aware of userns

Again it's not about working - we actually don't (through LSM) allow
writes under any of them anyway.  It's about containers and
non-containers having similar boot sequences when possible.

> mappings for it to work right.  But ISTM it would be better for
> containers to be smart enough to keep going if debugfs fails to mount

"smart enough" in this case means finding ways to figure out information
that it wouldn't otherwise need, and the form of which could at some point
change, and generally just increases the future potential fragility.

Well, to be fair that's again really referring to the securityfs one.
Basically solving that would require teaching mountall to parse
/proc/self/uid_map to decide its namespace.

> -- this really seems like a userspace problem that ought to be fixed
> in userspace.

> > But for /sys/kernel/security, the failure of which to mount on a
> > non-container can be a real problem, that is not good enough.  So
> > at least I'd like securityfs to be mountable in a non-init userns.
> >
> 
> Will the container work if /sys/kernel/security is inaccessible even to "root"?

Yes.  As it is they're actually not allowed to write under there (by
LSM).  Containers start fine for me with these three mounted this way.

-serge
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