On Sat, Sep 28, 2019 at 07:37:27PM -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote: > On Wed, 28 Aug 2019 21:07:24 -0700 > Alexei Starovoitov <alexei.starovoitov@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > > > This won’t make me much more comfortable, since CAP_BPF lets it do an ever-growing set of nasty things. I’d much rather one or both of two things happen: > > > > > > 1. Give it CAP_TRACING only. It can leak my data, but it’s rather hard for it to crash my laptop, lose data, or cause other shenanigans. > > > > > > 2. Improve it a bit do all the privileged ops are wrapped by capset(). > > > > > > Does this make sense? I’m a security person on occasion. I find > > > vulnerabilities and exploit them deliberately and I break things by > > > accident on a regular basis. In my considered opinion, CAP_TRACING > > > alone, even extended to cover part of BPF as I’ve described, is > > > decently safe. Getting root with just CAP_TRACING will be decently > > > challenging, especially if I don’t get to read things like sshd’s > > > memory, and improvements to mitigate even that could be added. I > > > am quite confident that attacks starting with CAP_TRACING will have > > > clear audit signatures if auditing is on. I am also confident that > > > CAP_BPF *will* allow DoS and likely privilege escalation, and this > > > will only get more likely as BPF gets more widely used. And, if > > > BPF-based auditing ever becomes a thing, writing to the audit > > > daemon’s maps will be a great way to cover one’s tracks. > > > > CAP_TRACING, as I'm proposing it, will allow full tracefs access. > > I think Steven and Massami prefer that as well. > > That includes kprobe with probe_kernel_read. > > That also means mini-DoS by installing kprobes everywhere or running > > too much ftrace. > > I was talking with Kees at Plumbers about this, and we were talking > about just using simple file permissions. I started playing with some > patches to allow the tracefs be visible but by default it would only be > visible by root. > > rwx------ > > Then a start up script (or perhaps mount options) could change the > group owner, and change this to: > > rwxrwx--- > > Where anyone in the group assigned (say "tracing") gets full access to > the file system. > > The more I was playing with this, the less I see the need for > CAP_TRACING for ftrace and reading the format files. Nice! Thanks for playing with this. I like it because it gives us a way to push policy into userspace (group membership, etc), and provides a clean way (hopefully) do separate "read" (kernel memory confidentiality) from "write" (kernel memory integrity), which wouldn't have been possible with a single new CAP_... -Kees -- Kees Cook
