The current API of the SafeSetID LSM uses one write() per rule, and applies
each written rule instantly. This has several downsides:
- While a policy is being loaded, once a single parent-child pair has been
loaded, the parent is restricted to that specific child, even if
subsequent rules would allow transitions to other child UIDs. This means
that during policy loading, set*uid() can randomly fail.
- To replace the policy without rebooting, it is necessary to first flush
all old rules. This creates a time window in which no constraints are
placed on the use of CAP_SETUID.
- If we want to perform sanity checks on the final policy, this requires
that the policy isn't constructed in a piecemeal fashion without telling
the kernel when it's done.
Other kernel APIs - including things like the userns code and netfilter -
avoid this problem by performing updates atomically. Luckily, SafeSetID
hasn't landed in a stable (upstream) release yet, so maybe it's not too
late to completely change the API.
The new API for SafeSetID is: If you want to change the policy, open
"safesetid/whitelist_policy" and write the entire policy,
newline-delimited, in there.
Signed-off-by: Jann Horn <jannh@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Micah Morton <mortonm@chromium.org>
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