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Date:   Wed, 26 Aug 2020 14:48:19 -0600
From:   Ross Zwisler <zwisler@google.com>
To:     Alexander Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Cc:     linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
        Mattias Nissler <mnissler@chromium.org>,
        Aleksa Sarai <cyphar@cyphar.com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        Benjamin Gordon <bmgordon@google.com>,
        David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>,
        Dmitry Torokhov <dtor@google.com>,
        Jesse Barnes <jsbarnes@google.com>,
        linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, linux-kselftest@vger.kernel.org,
        Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>,
        Micah Morton <mortonm@google.com>,
        Raul Rangel <rrangel@google.com>, Shuah Khan <shuah@kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v8 1/2] Add a "nosymfollow" mount option.
Message-ID: <20200826204819.GA4414@google.com>
References: <20200819164317.637421-1-zwisler@google.com>
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O Wed, Aug 19, 2020 at 10:43:16AM -0600, Ross Zwisler wrote:
> From: Mattias Nissler <mnissler@chromium.org>
> 
> For mounts that have the new "nosymfollow" option, don't follow symlinks
> when resolving paths. The new option is similar in spirit to the
> existing "nodev", "noexec", and "nosuid" options, as well as to the
> LOOKUP_NO_SYMLINKS resolve flag in the openat2(2) syscall. Various BSD
> variants have been supporting the "nosymfollow" mount option for a long
> time with equivalent implementations.
> 
> Note that symlinks may still be created on file systems mounted with
> the "nosymfollow" option present. readlink() remains functional, so
> user space code that is aware of symlinks can still choose to follow
> them explicitly.
> 
> Setting the "nosymfollow" mount option helps prevent privileged
> writers from modifying files unintentionally in case there is an
> unexpected link along the accessed path. The "nosymfollow" option is
> thus useful as a defensive measure for systems that need to deal with
> untrusted file systems in privileged contexts.
> 
> More information on the history and motivation for this patch can be
> found here:
> 
> https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/hardening-against-malicious-stateful-data#TOC-Restricting-symlink-traversal
> 
> Signed-off-by: Mattias Nissler <mnissler@chromium.org>
> Signed-off-by: Ross Zwisler <zwisler@google.com>
> Reviewed-by: Aleksa Sarai <cyphar@cyphar.com>
> ---
> Changes since v7 [1]:
>  * Rebased onto v5.9-rc1.
>  * Added selftest in second patch.
>  * Added Aleska's Reviewed-By tag.  Thank you for the review!
> 
> After this lands I will upstream changes to util-linux[2] and man-pages
> [3].
> 
> [1]: https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/8/11/896
> [2]: https://github.com/rzwisler/util-linux/commit/7f8771acd85edb70d97921c026c55e1e724d4e15
> [3]: https://github.com/rzwisler/man-pages/commit/b8fe8079f64b5068940c0144586e580399a71668
> ---

Friendly ping on this.

Al, now that the changes to fs/namei.c have landed and we're past the merge
window for v5.9, what are your thoughts on this patch and the associated test?