<feed xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom'>
<title>linux.git/fs/namei.c, branch v5.6</title>
<subtitle>Linux kernel source tree</subtitle>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.tavy.me/linux.git/'/>
<entry>
<title>vfs: fix do_last() regression</title>
<updated>2020-02-01T18:36:49+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Al Viro</name>
<email>viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk</email>
</author>
<published>2020-02-01T16:26:45+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.tavy.me/linux.git/commit/?id=6404674acd596de41fd3ad5f267b4525494a891a'/>
<id>6404674acd596de41fd3ad5f267b4525494a891a</id>
<content type='text'>
Brown paperbag time: fetching -&gt;i_uid/-&gt;i_mode really should've been
done from nd-&gt;inode.  I even suggested that, but the reason for that has
slipped through the cracks and I went for dir-&gt;d_inode instead - made
for more "obvious" patch.

Analysis:

 - at the entry into do_last() and all the way to step_into(): dir (aka
   nd-&gt;path.dentry) is known not to have been freed; so's nd-&gt;inode and
   it's equal to dir-&gt;d_inode unless we are already doomed to -ECHILD.
   inode of the file to get opened is not known.

 - after step_into(): inode of the file to get opened is known; dir
   might be pointing to freed memory/be negative/etc.

 - at the call of may_create_in_sticky(): guaranteed to be out of RCU
   mode; inode of the file to get opened is known and pinned; dir might
   be garbage.

The last was the reason for the original patch.  Except that at the
do_last() entry we can be in RCU mode and it is possible that
nd-&gt;path.dentry-&gt;d_inode has already changed under us.

In that case we are going to fail with -ECHILD, but we need to be
careful; nd-&gt;inode is pointing to valid struct inode and it's the same
as nd-&gt;path.dentry-&gt;d_inode in "won't fail with -ECHILD" case, so we
should use that.

Reported-by: "Rantala, Tommi T. (Nokia - FI/Espoo)" &lt;tommi.t.rantala@nokia.com&gt;
Reported-by: syzbot+190005201ced78a74ad6@syzkaller.appspotmail.com
Wearing-brown-paperbag: Al Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
Cc: stable@kernel.org
Fixes: d0cb50185ae9 ("do_last(): fetch directory -&gt;i_mode and -&gt;i_uid before it's too late")
Signed-off-by: Al Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
Brown paperbag time: fetching -&gt;i_uid/-&gt;i_mode really should've been
done from nd-&gt;inode.  I even suggested that, but the reason for that has
slipped through the cracks and I went for dir-&gt;d_inode instead - made
for more "obvious" patch.

Analysis:

 - at the entry into do_last() and all the way to step_into(): dir (aka
   nd-&gt;path.dentry) is known not to have been freed; so's nd-&gt;inode and
   it's equal to dir-&gt;d_inode unless we are already doomed to -ECHILD.
   inode of the file to get opened is not known.

 - after step_into(): inode of the file to get opened is known; dir
   might be pointing to freed memory/be negative/etc.

 - at the call of may_create_in_sticky(): guaranteed to be out of RCU
   mode; inode of the file to get opened is known and pinned; dir might
   be garbage.

The last was the reason for the original patch.  Except that at the
do_last() entry we can be in RCU mode and it is possible that
nd-&gt;path.dentry-&gt;d_inode has already changed under us.

In that case we are going to fail with -ECHILD, but we need to be
careful; nd-&gt;inode is pointing to valid struct inode and it's the same
as nd-&gt;path.dentry-&gt;d_inode in "won't fail with -ECHILD" case, so we
should use that.

Reported-by: "Rantala, Tommi T. (Nokia - FI/Espoo)" &lt;tommi.t.rantala@nokia.com&gt;
Reported-by: syzbot+190005201ced78a74ad6@syzkaller.appspotmail.com
Wearing-brown-paperbag: Al Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
Cc: stable@kernel.org
Fixes: d0cb50185ae9 ("do_last(): fetch directory -&gt;i_mode and -&gt;i_uid before it's too late")
Signed-off-by: Al Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Merge branch 'work.openat2' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/viro/vfs</title>
<updated>2020-01-29T19:20:24+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Linus Torvalds</name>
<email>torvalds@linux-foundation.org</email>
</author>
<published>2020-01-29T19:20:24+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.tavy.me/linux.git/commit/?id=6aee4badd8126f3a2b6d31c5e2db2439d316374f'/>
<id>6aee4badd8126f3a2b6d31c5e2db2439d316374f</id>
<content type='text'>
Pull openat2 support from Al Viro:
 "This is the openat2() series from Aleksa Sarai.

  I'm afraid that the rest of namei stuff will have to wait - it got
  zero review the last time I'd posted #work.namei, and there had been a
  leak in the posted series I'd caught only last weekend. I was going to
  repost it on Monday, but the window opened and the odds of getting any
  review during that... Oh, well.

  Anyway, openat2 part should be ready; that _did_ get sane amount of
  review and public testing, so here it comes"

From Aleksa's description of the series:
 "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).

  Furthermore, the need for some sort of control over VFS's path
  resolution (to avoid malicious paths resulting in inadvertent
  breakouts) has been a very long-standing desire of many userspace
  applications.

  This patchset is a revival of Al Viro's old AT_NO_JUMPS[3] patchset
  (which was a variant of David Drysdale's O_BENEATH patchset[4] which
  was a spin-off of the Capsicum project[5]) with a few additions and
  changes made based on the previous discussion within [6] as well as
  others I felt were useful.

  In line with the conclusions of the original discussion of
  AT_NO_JUMPS, the flag has been split up into separate flags. However,
  instead of being an openat(2) flag it is provided through a new
  syscall openat2(2) which provides several other improvements to the
  openat(2) interface (see the patch description for more details). The
  following new LOOKUP_* flags are added:

  LOOKUP_NO_XDEV:

     Blocks all mountpoint crossings (upwards, downwards, or through
     absolute links). Absolute pathnames alone in openat(2) do not
     trigger this. Magic-link traversal which implies a vfsmount jump is
     also blocked (though magic-link jumps on the same vfsmount are
     permitted).

  LOOKUP_NO_MAGICLINKS:

     Blocks resolution through /proc/$pid/fd-style links. This is done
     by blocking the usage of nd_jump_link() during resolution in a
     filesystem. The term "magic-links" is used to match with the only
     reference to these links in Documentation/, but I'm happy to change
     the name.

     It should be noted that this is different to the scope of
     ~LOOKUP_FOLLOW in that it applies to all path components. However,
     you can do openat2(NO_FOLLOW|NO_MAGICLINKS) on a magic-link and it
     will *not* fail (assuming that no parent component was a
     magic-link), and you will have an fd for the magic-link.

     In order to correctly detect magic-links, the introduction of a new
     LOOKUP_MAGICLINK_JUMPED state flag was required.

  LOOKUP_BENEATH:

     Disallows escapes to outside the starting dirfd's
     tree, using techniques such as ".." or absolute links. Absolute
     paths in openat(2) are also disallowed.

     Conceptually this flag is to ensure you "stay below" a certain
     point in the filesystem tree -- but this requires some additional
     to protect against various races that would allow escape using
     "..".

     Currently LOOKUP_BENEATH implies LOOKUP_NO_MAGICLINKS, because it
     can trivially beam you around the filesystem (breaking the
     protection). In future, there might be similar safety checks done
     as in LOOKUP_IN_ROOT, but that requires more discussion.

  In addition, two new flags are added that expand on the above ideas:

  LOOKUP_NO_SYMLINKS:

     Does what it says on the tin. No symlink resolution is allowed at
     all, including magic-links. Just as with LOOKUP_NO_MAGICLINKS this
     can still be used with NOFOLLOW to open an fd for the symlink as
     long as no parent path had a symlink component.

  LOOKUP_IN_ROOT:

     This is an extension of LOOKUP_BENEATH that, rather than blocking
     attempts to move past the root, forces all such movements to be
     scoped to the starting point. This provides chroot(2)-like
     protection but without the cost of a chroot(2) for each filesystem
     operation, as well as being safe against race attacks that
     chroot(2) is not.

     If a race is detected (as with LOOKUP_BENEATH) then an error is
     generated, and similar to LOOKUP_BENEATH it is not permitted to
     cross magic-links with LOOKUP_IN_ROOT.

     The primary need for this is from container runtimes, which
     currently need to do symlink scoping in userspace[7] when opening
     paths in a potentially malicious container.

     There is a long list of CVEs that could have bene mitigated by
     having RESOLVE_THIS_ROOT (such as CVE-2017-1002101,
     CVE-2017-1002102, CVE-2018-15664, and CVE-2019-5736, just to name a
     few).

  In order to make all of the above more usable, I'm working on
  libpathrs[8] which is a C-friendly library for safe path resolution.
  It features a userspace-emulated backend if the kernel doesn't support
  openat2(2). Hopefully we can get userspace to switch to using it, and
  thus get openat2(2) support for free once it's ready.

  Future work would include implementing things like
  RESOLVE_NO_AUTOMOUNT and possibly a RESOLVE_NO_REMOTE (to allow
  programs to be sure they don't hit DoSes though stale NFS handles)"

* 'work.openat2' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/viro/vfs:
  Documentation: path-lookup: include new LOOKUP flags
  selftests: add openat2(2) selftests
  open: introduce openat2(2) syscall
  namei: LOOKUP_{IN_ROOT,BENEATH}: permit limited ".." resolution
  namei: LOOKUP_IN_ROOT: chroot-like scoped resolution
  namei: LOOKUP_BENEATH: O_BENEATH-like scoped resolution
  namei: LOOKUP_NO_XDEV: block mountpoint crossing
  namei: LOOKUP_NO_MAGICLINKS: block magic-link resolution
  namei: LOOKUP_NO_SYMLINKS: block symlink resolution
  namei: allow set_root() to produce errors
  namei: allow nd_jump_link() to produce errors
  nsfs: clean-up ns_get_path() signature to return int
  namei: only return -ECHILD from follow_dotdot_rcu()
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
Pull openat2 support from Al Viro:
 "This is the openat2() series from Aleksa Sarai.

  I'm afraid that the rest of namei stuff will have to wait - it got
  zero review the last time I'd posted #work.namei, and there had been a
  leak in the posted series I'd caught only last weekend. I was going to
  repost it on Monday, but the window opened and the odds of getting any
  review during that... Oh, well.

  Anyway, openat2 part should be ready; that _did_ get sane amount of
  review and public testing, so here it comes"

From Aleksa's description of the series:
 "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).

  Furthermore, the need for some sort of control over VFS's path
  resolution (to avoid malicious paths resulting in inadvertent
  breakouts) has been a very long-standing desire of many userspace
  applications.

  This patchset is a revival of Al Viro's old AT_NO_JUMPS[3] patchset
  (which was a variant of David Drysdale's O_BENEATH patchset[4] which
  was a spin-off of the Capsicum project[5]) with a few additions and
  changes made based on the previous discussion within [6] as well as
  others I felt were useful.

  In line with the conclusions of the original discussion of
  AT_NO_JUMPS, the flag has been split up into separate flags. However,
  instead of being an openat(2) flag it is provided through a new
  syscall openat2(2) which provides several other improvements to the
  openat(2) interface (see the patch description for more details). The
  following new LOOKUP_* flags are added:

  LOOKUP_NO_XDEV:

     Blocks all mountpoint crossings (upwards, downwards, or through
     absolute links). Absolute pathnames alone in openat(2) do not
     trigger this. Magic-link traversal which implies a vfsmount jump is
     also blocked (though magic-link jumps on the same vfsmount are
     permitted).

  LOOKUP_NO_MAGICLINKS:

     Blocks resolution through /proc/$pid/fd-style links. This is done
     by blocking the usage of nd_jump_link() during resolution in a
     filesystem. The term "magic-links" is used to match with the only
     reference to these links in Documentation/, but I'm happy to change
     the name.

     It should be noted that this is different to the scope of
     ~LOOKUP_FOLLOW in that it applies to all path components. However,
     you can do openat2(NO_FOLLOW|NO_MAGICLINKS) on a magic-link and it
     will *not* fail (assuming that no parent component was a
     magic-link), and you will have an fd for the magic-link.

     In order to correctly detect magic-links, the introduction of a new
     LOOKUP_MAGICLINK_JUMPED state flag was required.

  LOOKUP_BENEATH:

     Disallows escapes to outside the starting dirfd's
     tree, using techniques such as ".." or absolute links. Absolute
     paths in openat(2) are also disallowed.

     Conceptually this flag is to ensure you "stay below" a certain
     point in the filesystem tree -- but this requires some additional
     to protect against various races that would allow escape using
     "..".

     Currently LOOKUP_BENEATH implies LOOKUP_NO_MAGICLINKS, because it
     can trivially beam you around the filesystem (breaking the
     protection). In future, there might be similar safety checks done
     as in LOOKUP_IN_ROOT, but that requires more discussion.

  In addition, two new flags are added that expand on the above ideas:

  LOOKUP_NO_SYMLINKS:

     Does what it says on the tin. No symlink resolution is allowed at
     all, including magic-links. Just as with LOOKUP_NO_MAGICLINKS this
     can still be used with NOFOLLOW to open an fd for the symlink as
     long as no parent path had a symlink component.

  LOOKUP_IN_ROOT:

     This is an extension of LOOKUP_BENEATH that, rather than blocking
     attempts to move past the root, forces all such movements to be
     scoped to the starting point. This provides chroot(2)-like
     protection but without the cost of a chroot(2) for each filesystem
     operation, as well as being safe against race attacks that
     chroot(2) is not.

     If a race is detected (as with LOOKUP_BENEATH) then an error is
     generated, and similar to LOOKUP_BENEATH it is not permitted to
     cross magic-links with LOOKUP_IN_ROOT.

     The primary need for this is from container runtimes, which
     currently need to do symlink scoping in userspace[7] when opening
     paths in a potentially malicious container.

     There is a long list of CVEs that could have bene mitigated by
     having RESOLVE_THIS_ROOT (such as CVE-2017-1002101,
     CVE-2017-1002102, CVE-2018-15664, and CVE-2019-5736, just to name a
     few).

  In order to make all of the above more usable, I'm working on
  libpathrs[8] which is a C-friendly library for safe path resolution.
  It features a userspace-emulated backend if the kernel doesn't support
  openat2(2). Hopefully we can get userspace to switch to using it, and
  thus get openat2(2) support for free once it's ready.

  Future work would include implementing things like
  RESOLVE_NO_AUTOMOUNT and possibly a RESOLVE_NO_REMOTE (to allow
  programs to be sure they don't hit DoSes though stale NFS handles)"

* 'work.openat2' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/viro/vfs:
  Documentation: path-lookup: include new LOOKUP flags
  selftests: add openat2(2) selftests
  open: introduce openat2(2) syscall
  namei: LOOKUP_{IN_ROOT,BENEATH}: permit limited ".." resolution
  namei: LOOKUP_IN_ROOT: chroot-like scoped resolution
  namei: LOOKUP_BENEATH: O_BENEATH-like scoped resolution
  namei: LOOKUP_NO_XDEV: block mountpoint crossing
  namei: LOOKUP_NO_MAGICLINKS: block magic-link resolution
  namei: LOOKUP_NO_SYMLINKS: block symlink resolution
  namei: allow set_root() to produce errors
  namei: allow nd_jump_link() to produce errors
  nsfs: clean-up ns_get_path() signature to return int
  namei: only return -ECHILD from follow_dotdot_rcu()
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>do_last(): fetch directory -&gt;i_mode and -&gt;i_uid before it's too late</title>
<updated>2020-01-26T14:31:07+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Al Viro</name>
<email>viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk</email>
</author>
<published>2020-01-26T14:29:34+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.tavy.me/linux.git/commit/?id=d0cb50185ae942b03c4327be322055d622dc79f6'/>
<id>d0cb50185ae942b03c4327be322055d622dc79f6</id>
<content type='text'>
may_create_in_sticky() call is done when we already have dropped the
reference to dir.

Fixes: 30aba6656f61e (namei: allow restricted O_CREAT of FIFOs and regular files)
Signed-off-by: Al Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
may_create_in_sticky() call is done when we already have dropped the
reference to dir.

Fixes: 30aba6656f61e (namei: allow restricted O_CREAT of FIFOs and regular files)
Signed-off-by: Al Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>fix autofs regression caused by follow_managed() changes</title>
<updated>2020-01-15T06:36:46+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Al Viro</name>
<email>viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk</email>
</author>
<published>2020-01-15T03:09:57+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.tavy.me/linux.git/commit/?id=508c8772760d4ef9c1a044519b564710c3684fc5'/>
<id>508c8772760d4ef9c1a044519b564710c3684fc5</id>
<content type='text'>
we need to reload -&gt;d_flags after the call of -&gt;d_manage() - the thing
might've been called with dentry still negative and have the damn thing
turned positive while we'd waited.

Fixes: d41efb522e90 "fs/namei.c: pull positivity check into follow_managed()"
Reported-by: Ian Kent &lt;raven@themaw.net&gt;
Tested-by: Ian Kent &lt;raven@themaw.net&gt;
Signed-off-by: Al Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
we need to reload -&gt;d_flags after the call of -&gt;d_manage() - the thing
might've been called with dentry still negative and have the damn thing
turned positive while we'd waited.

Fixes: d41efb522e90 "fs/namei.c: pull positivity check into follow_managed()"
Reported-by: Ian Kent &lt;raven@themaw.net&gt;
Tested-by: Ian Kent &lt;raven@themaw.net&gt;
Signed-off-by: Al Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>reimplement path_mountpoint() with less magic</title>
<updated>2020-01-15T06:36:06+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Al Viro</name>
<email>viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk</email>
</author>
<published>2020-01-10T22:17:19+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.tavy.me/linux.git/commit/?id=c64cd6e34ea340adbb2a0a2f99cc884b96dcdca5'/>
<id>c64cd6e34ea340adbb2a0a2f99cc884b96dcdca5</id>
<content type='text'>
... and get rid of a bunch of bugs in it.  Background:
the reason for path_mountpoint() is that umount() really doesn't
want attempts to revalidate the root of what it's trying to umount.
The thing we want to avoid actually happen from complete_walk();
solution was to do something parallel to normal path_lookupat()
and it both went overboard and got the boilerplate subtly
(and not so subtly) wrong.

A better solution is to do pretty much what the normal path_lookupat()
does, but instead of complete_walk() do unlazy_walk().  All it takes
to avoid that -&gt;d_weak_revalidate() call...  mountpoint_last() goes
away, along with everything it got wrong, and so does the magic around
LOOKUP_NO_REVAL.

Another source of bugs is that when we traverse mounts at the final
location (and we need to do that - umount . expects to get whatever's
overmounting ., if any, out of the lookup) we really ought to take
care of -&gt;d_manage() - as it is, manual umount of autofs automount
in progress can lead to unpleasant surprises for the daemon.  Easily
solved by using handle_lookup_down() instead of follow_mount().

Tested-by: Ian Kent &lt;raven@themaw.net&gt;
Signed-off-by: Al Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
... and get rid of a bunch of bugs in it.  Background:
the reason for path_mountpoint() is that umount() really doesn't
want attempts to revalidate the root of what it's trying to umount.
The thing we want to avoid actually happen from complete_walk();
solution was to do something parallel to normal path_lookupat()
and it both went overboard and got the boilerplate subtly
(and not so subtly) wrong.

A better solution is to do pretty much what the normal path_lookupat()
does, but instead of complete_walk() do unlazy_walk().  All it takes
to avoid that -&gt;d_weak_revalidate() call...  mountpoint_last() goes
away, along with everything it got wrong, and so does the magic around
LOOKUP_NO_REVAL.

Another source of bugs is that when we traverse mounts at the final
location (and we need to do that - umount . expects to get whatever's
overmounting ., if any, out of the lookup) we really ought to take
care of -&gt;d_manage() - as it is, manual umount of autofs automount
in progress can lead to unpleasant surprises for the daemon.  Easily
solved by using handle_lookup_down() instead of follow_mount().

Tested-by: Ian Kent &lt;raven@themaw.net&gt;
Signed-off-by: Al Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>namei: LOOKUP_{IN_ROOT,BENEATH}: permit limited ".." resolution</title>
<updated>2019-12-09T00:09:44+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Aleksa Sarai</name>
<email>cyphar@cyphar.com</email>
</author>
<published>2019-12-06T14:13:35+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.tavy.me/linux.git/commit/?id=ab87f9a56c8ee9fa6856cb13d8f2905db913baae'/>
<id>ab87f9a56c8ee9fa6856cb13d8f2905db913baae</id>
<content type='text'>
Allow LOOKUP_BENEATH and LOOKUP_IN_ROOT to safely permit ".." resolution
(in the case of LOOKUP_BENEATH the resolution will still fail if ".."
resolution would resolve a path outside of the root -- while
LOOKUP_IN_ROOT will chroot(2)-style scope it). Magic-link jumps are
still disallowed entirely[*].

As Jann explains[1,2], the need for this patch (and the original no-".."
restriction) is explained by observing there is a fairly easy-to-exploit
race condition with chroot(2) (and thus by extension LOOKUP_IN_ROOT and
LOOKUP_BENEATH if ".." is allowed) where a rename(2) of a path can be
used to "skip over" nd-&gt;root and thus escape to the filesystem above
nd-&gt;root.

  thread1 [attacker]:
    for (;;)
      renameat2(AT_FDCWD, "/a/b/c", AT_FDCWD, "/a/d", RENAME_EXCHANGE);
  thread2 [victim]:
    for (;;)
      openat2(dirb, "b/c/../../etc/shadow",
              { .flags = O_PATH, .resolve = RESOLVE_IN_ROOT } );

With fairly significant regularity, thread2 will resolve to
"/etc/shadow" rather than "/a/b/etc/shadow". There is also a similar
(though somewhat more privileged) attack using MS_MOVE.

With this patch, such cases will be detected *during* ".." resolution
and will return -EAGAIN for userspace to decide to either retry or abort
the lookup. It should be noted that ".." is the weak point of chroot(2)
-- walking *into* a subdirectory tautologically cannot result in you
walking *outside* nd-&gt;root (except through a bind-mount or magic-link).
There is also no other way for a directory's parent to change (which is
the primary worry with ".." resolution here) other than a rename or
MS_MOVE.

The primary reason for deferring to userspace with -EAGAIN is that an
in-kernel retry loop (or doing a path_is_under() check after re-taking
the relevant seqlocks) can become unreasonably expensive on machines
with lots of VFS activity (nfsd can cause lots of rename_lock updates).
Thus it should be up to userspace how many times they wish to retry the
lookup -- the selftests for this attack indicate that there is a ~35%
chance of the lookup succeeding on the first try even with an attacker
thrashing rename_lock.

A variant of the above attack is included in the selftests for
openat2(2) later in this patch series. I've run this test on several
machines for several days and no instances of a breakout were detected.
While this is not concrete proof that this is safe, when combined with
the above argument it should lend some trustworthiness to this
construction.

[*] It may be acceptable in the future to do a path_is_under() check for
    magic-links after they are resolved. However this seems unlikely to
    be a feature that people *really* need -- it can be added later if
    it turns out a lot of people want it.

[1]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAG48ez1jzNvxB+bfOBnERFGp=oMM0vHWuLD6EULmne3R6xa53w@mail.gmail.com/
[2]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAG48ez30WJhbsro2HOc_DR7V91M+hNFzBP5ogRMZaxbAORvqzg@mail.gmail.com/

Cc: Christian Brauner &lt;christian.brauner@ubuntu.com&gt;
Suggested-by: Jann Horn &lt;jannh@google.com&gt;
Suggested-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Aleksa Sarai &lt;cyphar@cyphar.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Al Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
Allow LOOKUP_BENEATH and LOOKUP_IN_ROOT to safely permit ".." resolution
(in the case of LOOKUP_BENEATH the resolution will still fail if ".."
resolution would resolve a path outside of the root -- while
LOOKUP_IN_ROOT will chroot(2)-style scope it). Magic-link jumps are
still disallowed entirely[*].

As Jann explains[1,2], the need for this patch (and the original no-".."
restriction) is explained by observing there is a fairly easy-to-exploit
race condition with chroot(2) (and thus by extension LOOKUP_IN_ROOT and
LOOKUP_BENEATH if ".." is allowed) where a rename(2) of a path can be
used to "skip over" nd-&gt;root and thus escape to the filesystem above
nd-&gt;root.

  thread1 [attacker]:
    for (;;)
      renameat2(AT_FDCWD, "/a/b/c", AT_FDCWD, "/a/d", RENAME_EXCHANGE);
  thread2 [victim]:
    for (;;)
      openat2(dirb, "b/c/../../etc/shadow",
              { .flags = O_PATH, .resolve = RESOLVE_IN_ROOT } );

With fairly significant regularity, thread2 will resolve to
"/etc/shadow" rather than "/a/b/etc/shadow". There is also a similar
(though somewhat more privileged) attack using MS_MOVE.

With this patch, such cases will be detected *during* ".." resolution
and will return -EAGAIN for userspace to decide to either retry or abort
the lookup. It should be noted that ".." is the weak point of chroot(2)
-- walking *into* a subdirectory tautologically cannot result in you
walking *outside* nd-&gt;root (except through a bind-mount or magic-link).
There is also no other way for a directory's parent to change (which is
the primary worry with ".." resolution here) other than a rename or
MS_MOVE.

The primary reason for deferring to userspace with -EAGAIN is that an
in-kernel retry loop (or doing a path_is_under() check after re-taking
the relevant seqlocks) can become unreasonably expensive on machines
with lots of VFS activity (nfsd can cause lots of rename_lock updates).
Thus it should be up to userspace how many times they wish to retry the
lookup -- the selftests for this attack indicate that there is a ~35%
chance of the lookup succeeding on the first try even with an attacker
thrashing rename_lock.

A variant of the above attack is included in the selftests for
openat2(2) later in this patch series. I've run this test on several
machines for several days and no instances of a breakout were detected.
While this is not concrete proof that this is safe, when combined with
the above argument it should lend some trustworthiness to this
construction.

[*] It may be acceptable in the future to do a path_is_under() check for
    magic-links after they are resolved. However this seems unlikely to
    be a feature that people *really* need -- it can be added later if
    it turns out a lot of people want it.

[1]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAG48ez1jzNvxB+bfOBnERFGp=oMM0vHWuLD6EULmne3R6xa53w@mail.gmail.com/
[2]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAG48ez30WJhbsro2HOc_DR7V91M+hNFzBP5ogRMZaxbAORvqzg@mail.gmail.com/

Cc: Christian Brauner &lt;christian.brauner@ubuntu.com&gt;
Suggested-by: Jann Horn &lt;jannh@google.com&gt;
Suggested-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Aleksa Sarai &lt;cyphar@cyphar.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Al Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>namei: LOOKUP_IN_ROOT: chroot-like scoped resolution</title>
<updated>2019-12-09T00:09:43+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Aleksa Sarai</name>
<email>cyphar@cyphar.com</email>
</author>
<published>2019-12-06T14:13:34+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.tavy.me/linux.git/commit/?id=8db52c7e7ee1bd861b6096fcafc0fe7d0f24a994'/>
<id>8db52c7e7ee1bd861b6096fcafc0fe7d0f24a994</id>
<content type='text'>
/* Background. */
Container runtimes or other administrative management processes will
often interact with root filesystems while in the host mount namespace,
because the cost of doing a chroot(2) on every operation is too
prohibitive (especially in Go, which cannot safely use vfork). However,
a malicious program can trick the management process into doing
operations on files outside of the root filesystem through careful
crafting of symlinks.

Most programs that need this feature have attempted to make this process
safe, by doing all of the path resolution in userspace (with symlinks
being scoped to the root of the malicious root filesystem).
Unfortunately, this method is prone to foot-guns and usually such
implementations have subtle security bugs.

Thus, what userspace needs is a way to resolve a path as though it were
in a chroot(2) -- with all absolute symlinks being resolved relative to
the dirfd root (and ".." components being stuck under the dirfd root).
It is much simpler and more straight-forward to provide this
functionality in-kernel (because it can be done far more cheaply and
correctly).

More classical applications that also have this problem (which have
their own potentially buggy userspace path sanitisation code) include
web servers, archive extraction tools, network file servers, and so on.

/* Userspace API. */
LOOKUP_IN_ROOT will be exposed to userspace through openat2(2).

/* Semantics. */
Unlike most other LOOKUP flags (most notably LOOKUP_FOLLOW),
LOOKUP_IN_ROOT applies to all components of the path.

With LOOKUP_IN_ROOT, any path component which attempts to cross the
starting point of the pathname lookup (the dirfd passed to openat) will
remain at the starting point. Thus, all absolute paths and symlinks will
be scoped within the starting point.

There is a slight change in behaviour regarding pathnames -- if the
pathname is absolute then the dirfd is still used as the root of
resolution of LOOKUP_IN_ROOT is specified (this is to avoid obvious
foot-guns, at the cost of a minor API inconsistency).

As with LOOKUP_BENEATH, Jann's security concern about ".."[1] applies to
LOOKUP_IN_ROOT -- therefore ".." resolution is blocked. This restriction
will be lifted in a future patch, but requires more work to ensure that
permitting ".." is done safely.

Magic-link jumps are also blocked, because they can beam the path lookup
across the starting point. It would be possible to detect and block
only the "bad" crossings with path_is_under() checks, but it's unclear
whether it makes sense to permit magic-links at all. However, userspace
is recommended to pass LOOKUP_NO_MAGICLINKS if they want to ensure that
magic-link crossing is entirely disabled.

/* Testing. */
LOOKUP_IN_ROOT is tested as part of the openat2(2) selftests.

[1]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAG48ez1jzNvxB+bfOBnERFGp=oMM0vHWuLD6EULmne3R6xa53w@mail.gmail.com/

Cc: Christian Brauner &lt;christian.brauner@ubuntu.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Aleksa Sarai &lt;cyphar@cyphar.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Al Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
/* Background. */
Container runtimes or other administrative management processes will
often interact with root filesystems while in the host mount namespace,
because the cost of doing a chroot(2) on every operation is too
prohibitive (especially in Go, which cannot safely use vfork). However,
a malicious program can trick the management process into doing
operations on files outside of the root filesystem through careful
crafting of symlinks.

Most programs that need this feature have attempted to make this process
safe, by doing all of the path resolution in userspace (with symlinks
being scoped to the root of the malicious root filesystem).
Unfortunately, this method is prone to foot-guns and usually such
implementations have subtle security bugs.

Thus, what userspace needs is a way to resolve a path as though it were
in a chroot(2) -- with all absolute symlinks being resolved relative to
the dirfd root (and ".." components being stuck under the dirfd root).
It is much simpler and more straight-forward to provide this
functionality in-kernel (because it can be done far more cheaply and
correctly).

More classical applications that also have this problem (which have
their own potentially buggy userspace path sanitisation code) include
web servers, archive extraction tools, network file servers, and so on.

/* Userspace API. */
LOOKUP_IN_ROOT will be exposed to userspace through openat2(2).

/* Semantics. */
Unlike most other LOOKUP flags (most notably LOOKUP_FOLLOW),
LOOKUP_IN_ROOT applies to all components of the path.

With LOOKUP_IN_ROOT, any path component which attempts to cross the
starting point of the pathname lookup (the dirfd passed to openat) will
remain at the starting point. Thus, all absolute paths and symlinks will
be scoped within the starting point.

There is a slight change in behaviour regarding pathnames -- if the
pathname is absolute then the dirfd is still used as the root of
resolution of LOOKUP_IN_ROOT is specified (this is to avoid obvious
foot-guns, at the cost of a minor API inconsistency).

As with LOOKUP_BENEATH, Jann's security concern about ".."[1] applies to
LOOKUP_IN_ROOT -- therefore ".." resolution is blocked. This restriction
will be lifted in a future patch, but requires more work to ensure that
permitting ".." is done safely.

Magic-link jumps are also blocked, because they can beam the path lookup
across the starting point. It would be possible to detect and block
only the "bad" crossings with path_is_under() checks, but it's unclear
whether it makes sense to permit magic-links at all. However, userspace
is recommended to pass LOOKUP_NO_MAGICLINKS if they want to ensure that
magic-link crossing is entirely disabled.

/* Testing. */
LOOKUP_IN_ROOT is tested as part of the openat2(2) selftests.

[1]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAG48ez1jzNvxB+bfOBnERFGp=oMM0vHWuLD6EULmne3R6xa53w@mail.gmail.com/

Cc: Christian Brauner &lt;christian.brauner@ubuntu.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Aleksa Sarai &lt;cyphar@cyphar.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Al Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>namei: LOOKUP_BENEATH: O_BENEATH-like scoped resolution</title>
<updated>2019-12-09T00:09:42+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Aleksa Sarai</name>
<email>cyphar@cyphar.com</email>
</author>
<published>2019-12-06T14:13:33+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.tavy.me/linux.git/commit/?id=adb21d2b526f7f196b2f3fdca97d80ba05dd14a0'/>
<id>adb21d2b526f7f196b2f3fdca97d80ba05dd14a0</id>
<content type='text'>
/* Background. */
There are many circumstances when userspace wants to resolve a path and
ensure that it doesn't go outside of a particular root directory during
resolution. Obvious examples include archive extraction tools, as well as
other security-conscious userspace programs. FreeBSD spun out O_BENEATH
from their Capsicum project[1,2], so it also seems reasonable to
implement similar functionality for Linux.

This is part of a refresh of Al's AT_NO_JUMPS patchset[3] (which was a
variation on David Drysdale's O_BENEATH patchset[4], which in turn was
based on the Capsicum project[5]).

/* Userspace API. */
LOOKUP_BENEATH will be exposed to userspace through openat2(2).

/* Semantics. */
Unlike most other LOOKUP flags (most notably LOOKUP_FOLLOW),
LOOKUP_BENEATH applies to all components of the path.

With LOOKUP_BENEATH, any path component which attempts to "escape" the
starting point of the filesystem lookup (the dirfd passed to openat)
will yield -EXDEV. Thus, all absolute paths and symlinks are disallowed.

Due to a security concern brought up by Jann[6], any ".." path
components are also blocked. This restriction will be lifted in a future
patch, but requires more work to ensure that permitting ".." is done
safely.

Magic-link jumps are also blocked, because they can beam the path lookup
across the starting point. It would be possible to detect and block
only the "bad" crossings with path_is_under() checks, but it's unclear
whether it makes sense to permit magic-links at all. However, userspace
is recommended to pass LOOKUP_NO_MAGICLINKS if they want to ensure that
magic-link crossing is entirely disabled.

/* Testing. */
LOOKUP_BENEATH is tested as part of the openat2(2) selftests.

[1]: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D2808
[2]: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D17547
[3]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20170429220414.GT29622@ZenIV.linux.org.uk/
[4]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/1415094884-18349-1-git-send-email-drysdale@google.com/
[5]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/1404124096-21445-1-git-send-email-drysdale@google.com/
[6]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAG48ez1jzNvxB+bfOBnERFGp=oMM0vHWuLD6EULmne3R6xa53w@mail.gmail.com/

Cc: Christian Brauner &lt;christian.brauner@ubuntu.com&gt;
Suggested-by: David Drysdale &lt;drysdale@google.com&gt;
Suggested-by: Al Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
Suggested-by: Andy Lutomirski &lt;luto@kernel.org&gt;
Suggested-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Aleksa Sarai &lt;cyphar@cyphar.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Al Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
/* Background. */
There are many circumstances when userspace wants to resolve a path and
ensure that it doesn't go outside of a particular root directory during
resolution. Obvious examples include archive extraction tools, as well as
other security-conscious userspace programs. FreeBSD spun out O_BENEATH
from their Capsicum project[1,2], so it also seems reasonable to
implement similar functionality for Linux.

This is part of a refresh of Al's AT_NO_JUMPS patchset[3] (which was a
variation on David Drysdale's O_BENEATH patchset[4], which in turn was
based on the Capsicum project[5]).

/* Userspace API. */
LOOKUP_BENEATH will be exposed to userspace through openat2(2).

/* Semantics. */
Unlike most other LOOKUP flags (most notably LOOKUP_FOLLOW),
LOOKUP_BENEATH applies to all components of the path.

With LOOKUP_BENEATH, any path component which attempts to "escape" the
starting point of the filesystem lookup (the dirfd passed to openat)
will yield -EXDEV. Thus, all absolute paths and symlinks are disallowed.

Due to a security concern brought up by Jann[6], any ".." path
components are also blocked. This restriction will be lifted in a future
patch, but requires more work to ensure that permitting ".." is done
safely.

Magic-link jumps are also blocked, because they can beam the path lookup
across the starting point. It would be possible to detect and block
only the "bad" crossings with path_is_under() checks, but it's unclear
whether it makes sense to permit magic-links at all. However, userspace
is recommended to pass LOOKUP_NO_MAGICLINKS if they want to ensure that
magic-link crossing is entirely disabled.

/* Testing. */
LOOKUP_BENEATH is tested as part of the openat2(2) selftests.

[1]: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D2808
[2]: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D17547
[3]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20170429220414.GT29622@ZenIV.linux.org.uk/
[4]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/1415094884-18349-1-git-send-email-drysdale@google.com/
[5]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/1404124096-21445-1-git-send-email-drysdale@google.com/
[6]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAG48ez1jzNvxB+bfOBnERFGp=oMM0vHWuLD6EULmne3R6xa53w@mail.gmail.com/

Cc: Christian Brauner &lt;christian.brauner@ubuntu.com&gt;
Suggested-by: David Drysdale &lt;drysdale@google.com&gt;
Suggested-by: Al Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
Suggested-by: Andy Lutomirski &lt;luto@kernel.org&gt;
Suggested-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Aleksa Sarai &lt;cyphar@cyphar.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Al Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>namei: LOOKUP_NO_XDEV: block mountpoint crossing</title>
<updated>2019-12-09T00:09:41+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Aleksa Sarai</name>
<email>cyphar@cyphar.com</email>
</author>
<published>2019-12-06T14:13:32+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.tavy.me/linux.git/commit/?id=72ba29297e1439efaa54d9125b866ae9d15df339'/>
<id>72ba29297e1439efaa54d9125b866ae9d15df339</id>
<content type='text'>
/* Background. */
The need to contain path operations within a mountpoint has been a
long-standing usecase that userspace has historically implemented
manually with liberal usage of stat(). find, rsync, tar and
many other programs implement these semantics -- but it'd be much
simpler to have a fool-proof way of refusing to open a path if it
crosses a mountpoint.

This is part of a refresh of Al's AT_NO_JUMPS patchset[1] (which was a
variation on David Drysdale's O_BENEATH patchset[2], which in turn was
based on the Capsicum project[3]).

/* Userspace API. */
LOOKUP_NO_XDEV will be exposed to userspace through openat2(2).

/* Semantics. */
Unlike most other LOOKUP flags (most notably LOOKUP_FOLLOW),
LOOKUP_NO_XDEV applies to all components of the path.

With LOOKUP_NO_XDEV, any path component which crosses a mount-point
during path resolution (including "..") will yield an -EXDEV. Absolute
paths, absolute symlinks, and magic-links will only yield an -EXDEV if
the jump involved changing mount-points.

/* Testing. */
LOOKUP_NO_XDEV is tested as part of the openat2(2) selftests.

[1]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20170429220414.GT29622@ZenIV.linux.org.uk/
[2]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/1415094884-18349-1-git-send-email-drysdale@google.com/
[3]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/1404124096-21445-1-git-send-email-drysdale@google.com/

Cc: Christian Brauner &lt;christian.brauner@ubuntu.com&gt;
Suggested-by: David Drysdale &lt;drysdale@google.com&gt;
Suggested-by: Al Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
Suggested-by: Andy Lutomirski &lt;luto@kernel.org&gt;
Suggested-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Aleksa Sarai &lt;cyphar@cyphar.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Al Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
/* Background. */
The need to contain path operations within a mountpoint has been a
long-standing usecase that userspace has historically implemented
manually with liberal usage of stat(). find, rsync, tar and
many other programs implement these semantics -- but it'd be much
simpler to have a fool-proof way of refusing to open a path if it
crosses a mountpoint.

This is part of a refresh of Al's AT_NO_JUMPS patchset[1] (which was a
variation on David Drysdale's O_BENEATH patchset[2], which in turn was
based on the Capsicum project[3]).

/* Userspace API. */
LOOKUP_NO_XDEV will be exposed to userspace through openat2(2).

/* Semantics. */
Unlike most other LOOKUP flags (most notably LOOKUP_FOLLOW),
LOOKUP_NO_XDEV applies to all components of the path.

With LOOKUP_NO_XDEV, any path component which crosses a mount-point
during path resolution (including "..") will yield an -EXDEV. Absolute
paths, absolute symlinks, and magic-links will only yield an -EXDEV if
the jump involved changing mount-points.

/* Testing. */
LOOKUP_NO_XDEV is tested as part of the openat2(2) selftests.

[1]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20170429220414.GT29622@ZenIV.linux.org.uk/
[2]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/1415094884-18349-1-git-send-email-drysdale@google.com/
[3]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/1404124096-21445-1-git-send-email-drysdale@google.com/

Cc: Christian Brauner &lt;christian.brauner@ubuntu.com&gt;
Suggested-by: David Drysdale &lt;drysdale@google.com&gt;
Suggested-by: Al Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
Suggested-by: Andy Lutomirski &lt;luto@kernel.org&gt;
Suggested-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Aleksa Sarai &lt;cyphar@cyphar.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Al Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>namei: LOOKUP_NO_MAGICLINKS: block magic-link resolution</title>
<updated>2019-12-09T00:09:40+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Aleksa Sarai</name>
<email>cyphar@cyphar.com</email>
</author>
<published>2019-12-06T14:13:31+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.tavy.me/linux.git/commit/?id=4b99d4996979d582859c5a49072e92de124bf691'/>
<id>4b99d4996979d582859c5a49072e92de124bf691</id>
<content type='text'>
/* Background. */
There has always been a special class of symlink-like objects in procfs
(and a few other pseudo-filesystems) which allow for non-lexical
resolution of paths using nd_jump_link(). These "magic-links" do not
follow traditional mount namespace boundaries, and have been used
consistently in container escape attacks because they can be used to
trick unsuspecting privileged processes into resolving unexpected paths.

It is also non-trivial for userspace to unambiguously avoid resolving
magic-links, because they do not have a reliable indication that they
are a magic-link (in order to verify them you'd have to manually open
the path given by readlink(2) and then verify that the two file
descriptors reference the same underlying file, which is plagued with
possible race conditions or supplementary attack scenarios).

It would therefore be very helpful for userspace to be able to avoid
these symlinks easily, thus hopefully removing a tool from attackers'
toolboxes.

This is part of a refresh of Al's AT_NO_JUMPS patchset[1] (which was a
variation on David Drysdale's O_BENEATH patchset[2], which in turn was
based on the Capsicum project[3]).

/* Userspace API. */
LOOKUP_NO_MAGICLINKS will be exposed to userspace through openat2(2).

/* Semantics. */
Unlike most other LOOKUP flags (most notably LOOKUP_FOLLOW),
LOOKUP_NO_MAGICLINKS applies to all components of the path.

With LOOKUP_NO_MAGICLINKS, any magic-link path component encountered
during path resolution will yield -ELOOP. The handling of ~LOOKUP_FOLLOW
for a trailing magic-link is identical to LOOKUP_NO_SYMLINKS.

LOOKUP_NO_SYMLINKS implies LOOKUP_NO_MAGICLINKS.

/* Testing. */
LOOKUP_NO_MAGICLINKS is tested as part of the openat2(2) selftests.

[1]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20170429220414.GT29622@ZenIV.linux.org.uk/
[2]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/1415094884-18349-1-git-send-email-drysdale@google.com/
[3]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/1404124096-21445-1-git-send-email-drysdale@google.com/

Cc: Christian Brauner &lt;christian.brauner@ubuntu.com&gt;
Suggested-by: David Drysdale &lt;drysdale@google.com&gt;
Suggested-by: Al Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
Suggested-by: Andy Lutomirski &lt;luto@kernel.org&gt;
Suggested-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Aleksa Sarai &lt;cyphar@cyphar.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Al Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
/* Background. */
There has always been a special class of symlink-like objects in procfs
(and a few other pseudo-filesystems) which allow for non-lexical
resolution of paths using nd_jump_link(). These "magic-links" do not
follow traditional mount namespace boundaries, and have been used
consistently in container escape attacks because they can be used to
trick unsuspecting privileged processes into resolving unexpected paths.

It is also non-trivial for userspace to unambiguously avoid resolving
magic-links, because they do not have a reliable indication that they
are a magic-link (in order to verify them you'd have to manually open
the path given by readlink(2) and then verify that the two file
descriptors reference the same underlying file, which is plagued with
possible race conditions or supplementary attack scenarios).

It would therefore be very helpful for userspace to be able to avoid
these symlinks easily, thus hopefully removing a tool from attackers'
toolboxes.

This is part of a refresh of Al's AT_NO_JUMPS patchset[1] (which was a
variation on David Drysdale's O_BENEATH patchset[2], which in turn was
based on the Capsicum project[3]).

/* Userspace API. */
LOOKUP_NO_MAGICLINKS will be exposed to userspace through openat2(2).

/* Semantics. */
Unlike most other LOOKUP flags (most notably LOOKUP_FOLLOW),
LOOKUP_NO_MAGICLINKS applies to all components of the path.

With LOOKUP_NO_MAGICLINKS, any magic-link path component encountered
during path resolution will yield -ELOOP. The handling of ~LOOKUP_FOLLOW
for a trailing magic-link is identical to LOOKUP_NO_SYMLINKS.

LOOKUP_NO_SYMLINKS implies LOOKUP_NO_MAGICLINKS.

/* Testing. */
LOOKUP_NO_MAGICLINKS is tested as part of the openat2(2) selftests.

[1]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20170429220414.GT29622@ZenIV.linux.org.uk/
[2]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/1415094884-18349-1-git-send-email-drysdale@google.com/
[3]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/1404124096-21445-1-git-send-email-drysdale@google.com/

Cc: Christian Brauner &lt;christian.brauner@ubuntu.com&gt;
Suggested-by: David Drysdale &lt;drysdale@google.com&gt;
Suggested-by: Al Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
Suggested-by: Andy Lutomirski &lt;luto@kernel.org&gt;
Suggested-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Aleksa Sarai &lt;cyphar@cyphar.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Al Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
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