The rule is simple. Don't allow anything that wouldn't be allowed without unprivileged mappings. It was previously overlooked that establishing gid mappings would allow dropping groups and potentially gaining permission to files and directories that had lesser permissions for a specific group than for all other users. This is the rule needed to fix CVE-2014-8989 and prevent any other security issues with new_idmap_permitted. The reason for this rule is that the unix permission model is old and there are programs out there somewhere that take advantage of every little corner of it. So allowing a uid or gid mapping to be established without privielge that would allow anything that would not be allowed without that mapping will result in expectations from some code somewhere being violated. Violated expectations about the behavior of the OS is a long way to say a security issue. Cc: stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Signed-off-by: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> --- kernel/user_namespace.c | 4 +++- 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/kernel/user_namespace.c b/kernel/user_namespace.c index aa312b0dc3ec..b99c862a2e3f 100644 --- a/kernel/user_namespace.c +++ b/kernel/user_namespace.c @@ -812,7 +812,9 @@ static bool new_idmap_permitted(const struct file *file, struct user_namespace *ns, int cap_setid, struct uid_gid_map *new_map) { - /* Allow mapping to your own filesystem ids */ + /* Don't allow mappings that would allow anything that wouldn't + * be allowed without the establishment of unprivileged mappings. + */ if ((new_map->nr_extents == 1) && (new_map->extent[0].count == 1)) { u32 id = new_map->extent[0].lower_first; if (cap_setid == CAP_SETUID) { -- 1.9.1 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-api" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html