On Mon, Jan 25, 2016 at 11:57 PM, Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Kees Cook <keescook@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > >> On Mon, Jan 25, 2016 at 11:33 AM, Eric W. Biederman >> <ebiederm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>> Kees Cook <keescook@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: >>>> >>>> Well, I don't know about less weird, but it would leave a unneeded >>>> hole in the permission checks. >>> >>> To be clear the current patch has my: >>> >>> Nacked-by: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> >>> >>> The code is buggy, and poorly thought through. Your lack of interest in >>> fixing the bugs in your patch is distressing. >> >> I'm not sure where you see me having a "lack of interest". The >> existing cap-checking sysctls have a corner-case bug, which is >> orthogonal to this change. > > That certainly doesn't sound like you have any plans to change anything > there. > >>> So broken code, not willing to fix. No. We are not merging this sysctl. >> >> I think you're jumping to conclusions. :) > > I think I am the maintainer. > > What you are proposing is very much something that is only of interst to > people who are not using user namespaces. It is fatally flawed as > a way to avoid new attack surfaces for people who don't care as the > sysctl leaves user namespaces enabled by default. It is fatally flawed > as remediation to recommend to people to change if a new user namespace > related but is discovered. Any running process that happens to be > created while user namespace creation was enabled will continue to > exist. Effectively a reboot will be required as part of a mitigation. > Many sysadmins will get that wrong. > > I can't possibly see your sysctl as proposed achieving it's goals. A > person has to be entirely too aware of subtlety and nuance to use it > effectively. What you're saying is true for the "oh crap" case of a new userns related CVE being found. However, there is the case where sysadmins know for a fact that a set of machines should not allow user namespaces to be enabled. Currently they have 2 choices, 1) use their distro kernel as-is, which may not meet their goal of having userns disabled, or 2) rebuild their kernel to disable it, which may invalidate any support contracts they have. I tend to agree with you on the lack of value around runtime mitigation, but allowing an admin to toggle this as a blatant on/off switch on reboot does have value. >> This feature is already implemented by two distros, and likely wanted >> by others. We cannot ignore that. The sysctl default doesn't change >> the existing behavior, so this doesn't get in your way at all. Can you >> please respond to my earlier email where I rebutted each of your >> arguments against it? Just saying "no" and putting words in my mouth >> isn't very productive. > > Calling people who make mistakes insane is not a rebuttal. In security > usability matters, and your sysctl has low usability. > > Further you seem to have missed something crucial in your understanding. > As was explained earlier the sysctl was added to ubuntu to allow early > adopters to experiment not as a long term way of managing user > namespaces. > > > What sounds like a generally useful feature that would cover your use > case and many others is a per user limit on the number of user > namespaces users may create. Where that number may be zero? I don't see how that is really any better than a sysctl. Could you elaborate? josh -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-doc" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
