Restrict the ability to inspect kernel stacks of arbitrary tasks to root
in order to prevent a local attacker from exploiting racy stack unwinding
to leak kernel task stack contents.
See the added comment for a longer rationale.
There don't seem to be any users of this userspace API that can't
gracefully bail out if reading from the file fails. Therefore, I believe
that this change is unlikely to break things.
In the case that this patch does end up needing a revert, the next-best
solution might be to fake a single-entry stack based on wchan.
Fixes: 2ec220e27f50 ("proc: add /proc/*/stack")
Cc: stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Signed-off-by: Jann Horn <jannh@xxxxxxxxxx>
---
fs/proc/base.c | 14 ++++++++++++++
1 file changed, 14 insertions(+)
diff --git a/fs/proc/base.c b/fs/proc/base.c
index ccf86f16d9f0..7e9f07bf260d 100644
--- a/fs/proc/base.c
+++ b/fs/proc/base.c
@@ -407,6 +407,20 @@ static int proc_pid_stack(struct seq_file *m, struct pid_namespace *ns,
unsigned long *entries;
int err;
+ /*
+ * The ability to racily run the kernel stack unwinder on a running task
+ * and then observe the unwinder output is scary; while it is useful for
+ * debugging kernel issues, it can also allow an attacker to leak kernel
+ * stack contents.
+ * Doing this in a manner that is at least safe from races would require
+ * some work to ensure that the remote task can not be scheduled; and
+ * even then, this would still expose the unwinder as local attack
+ * surface.
+ * Therefore, this interface is restricted to root.
+ */
+ if (!file_ns_capable(m->file, &init_user_ns, CAP_SYS_ADMIN))
+ return -EACCES;
+
entries = kmalloc_array(MAX_STACK_TRACE_DEPTH, sizeof(*entries),
GFP_KERNEL);
if (!entries)
--
2.19.0.rc2.392.g5ba43deb5a-goog
