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authorAleksa Sarai <cyphar@cyphar.com>2020-01-18 23:07:59 +1100
committerAl Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>2020-01-18 09:19:18 -0500
commitfddb5d430ad9fa91b49b1d34d0202ffe2fa0e179 (patch)
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open: introduce openat2(2) syscall
/* Background. */ For a very long time, extending openat(2) with new features has been incredibly frustrating. This stems from the fact that openat(2) is possibly the most famous counter-example to the mantra "don't silently accept garbage from userspace" -- it doesn't check whether unknown flags are present[1]. This means that (generally) the addition of new flags to openat(2) has been fraught with backwards-compatibility issues (O_TMPFILE has to be defined as __O_TMPFILE|O_DIRECTORY|[O_RDWR or O_WRONLY] to ensure old kernels gave errors, since it's insecure to silently ignore the flag[2]). All new security-related flags therefore have a tough road to being added to openat(2). Userspace also has a hard time figuring out whether a particular flag is supported on a particular kernel. While it is now possible with contemporary kernels (thanks to [3]), older kernels will expose unknown flag bits through fcntl(F_GETFL). Giving a clear -EINVAL during openat(2) time matches modern syscall designs and is far more fool-proof. In addition, the newly-added path resolution restriction LOOKUP flags (which we would like to expose to user-space) don't feel related to the pre-existing O_* flag set -- they affect all components of path lookup. We'd therefore like to add a new flag argument. Adding a new syscall allows us to finally fix the flag-ignoring problem, and we can make it extensible enough so that we will hopefully never need an openat3(2). /* Syscall Prototype. */ /* * open_how is an extensible structure (similar in interface to * clone3(2) or sched_setattr(2)). The size parameter must be set to * sizeof(struct open_how), to allow for future extensions. All future * extensions will be appended to open_how, with their zero value * acting as a no-op default. */ struct open_how { /* ... */ }; int openat2(int dfd, const char *pathname, struct open_how *how, size_t size); /* Description. */ The initial version of 'struct open_how' contains the following fields: flags Used to specify openat(2)-style flags. However, any unknown flag bits or otherwise incorrect flag combinations (like O_PATH|O_RDWR) will result in -EINVAL. In addition, this field is 64-bits wide to allow for more O_ flags than currently permitted with openat(2). mode The file mode for O_CREAT or O_TMPFILE. Must be set to zero if flags does not contain O_CREAT or O_TMPFILE. resolve Restrict path resolution (in contrast to O_* flags they affect all path components). The current set of flags are as follows (at the moment, all of the RESOLVE_ flags are implemented as just passing the corresponding LOOKUP_ flag). RESOLVE_NO_XDEV => LOOKUP_NO_XDEV RESOLVE_NO_SYMLINKS => LOOKUP_NO_SYMLINKS RESOLVE_NO_MAGICLINKS => LOOKUP_NO_MAGICLINKS RESOLVE_BENEATH => LOOKUP_BENEATH RESOLVE_IN_ROOT => LOOKUP_IN_ROOT open_how does not contain an embedded size field, because it is of little benefit (userspace can figure out the kernel open_how size at runtime fairly easily without it). It also only contains u64s (even though ->mode arguably should be a u16) to avoid having padding fields which are never used in the future. Note that as a result of the new how->flags handling, O_PATH|O_TMPFILE is no longer permitted for openat(2). As far as I can tell, this has always been a bug and appears to not be used by userspace (and I've not seen any problems on my machines by disallowing it). If it turns out this breaks something, we can special-case it and only permit it for openat(2) but not openat2(2). After input from Florian Weimer, the new open_how and flag definitions are inside a separate header from uapi/linux/fcntl.h, to avoid problems that glibc has with importing that header. /* Testing. */ In a follow-up patch there are over 200 selftests which ensure that this syscall has the correct semantics and will correctly handle several attack scenarios. In addition, I've written a userspace library[4] which provides convenient wrappers around openat2(RESOLVE_IN_ROOT) (this is necessary because no other syscalls support RESOLVE_IN_ROOT, and thus lots of care must be taken when using RESOLVE_IN_ROOT'd file descriptors with other syscalls). During the development of this patch, I've run numerous verification tests using libpathrs (showing that the API is reasonably usable by userspace). /* Future Work. */ Additional RESOLVE_ flags have been suggested during the review period. These can be easily implemented separately (such as blocking auto-mount during resolution). Furthermore, there are some other proposed changes to the openat(2) interface (the most obvious example is magic-link hardening[5]) which would be a good opportunity to add a way for userspace to restrict how O_PATH file descriptors can be re-opened. Another possible avenue of future work would be some kind of CHECK_FIELDS[6] flag which causes the kernel to indicate to userspace which openat2(2) flags and fields are supported by the current kernel (to avoid userspace having to go through several guesses to figure it out). [1]: https://lwn.net/Articles/588444/ [2]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CA+55aFyyxJL1LyXZeBsf2ypriraj5ut1XkNDsunRBqgVjZU_6Q@mail.gmail.com [3]: commit 629e014bb834 ("fs: completely ignore unknown open flags") [4]: https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=17523 [5]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20190930183316.10190-2-cyphar@cyphar.com/ [6]: https://youtu.be/ggD-eb3yPVs Suggested-by: Christian Brauner <christian.brauner@ubuntu.com> Signed-off-by: Aleksa Sarai <cyphar@cyphar.com> Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Diffstat (limited to 'CREDITS')
-rw-r--r--CREDITS4
1 files changed, 3 insertions, 1 deletions
diff --git a/CREDITS b/CREDITS
index 9602b0fa1c95..a97d3280a627 100644
--- a/CREDITS
+++ b/CREDITS
@@ -3302,7 +3302,9 @@ S: France
N: Aleksa Sarai
E: cyphar@cyphar.com
W: https://www.cyphar.com/
-D: `pids` cgroup subsystem
+D: /sys/fs/cgroup/pids
+D: openat2(2)
+S: Sydney, Australia
N: Dipankar Sarma
E: dipankar@in.ibm.com