> > > OK, so this feature would effectively allow sb-wide watching of events that
> > > are generated from within the container (or its descendants). That sounds
> > > useful. Just one question: If there's some part of a filesystem, that is
> > > accesible by multiple containers (and thus multiple namespaces), or if
> > > there's some change done to the filesystem say by container management SW,
> > > then event for this change won't be visible inside the container (despite
> > > that the fs change itself will be visible).
> >
> > That is correct.
> > FYI, a privileged user can already mount an overlayfs in order to indirectly
> > open and write to a file.
> >
> > Because overlayfs opens the underlying file FMODE_NONOTIFY this will
> > hide OPEN/ACCESS/MODIFY/CLOSE events also for inode/sb marks.
> > Since 459c7c565ac3 ("ovl: unprivieged mounts"), so can unprivileged users.
> >
> > I wonder if that is a problem that we need to fix...
>
> I assume you are speaking of the filesystem that is absorbing the changes?
> AFAIU usually you are not supposed to access that filesystem alone but
> always access it only through overlayfs and in that case you won't see the
> problem?
>
Yes I am talking about the "backend" store for overlayfs.
Normally, that would be a subtree where changes are not expected
except through overlayfs and indeed it is documented that:
"If the underlying filesystem is changed, the behavior of the overlay
is undefined, though it will not result in a crash or deadlock."
Not reporting events falls well under "undefined".
But that is not the problem.
The problem is that if user A is watching a directory D for changes, then
an adversary user B which has read/write access to D can:
- Clone a userns wherein user B id is 0
- Mount a private overlayfs instance using D as upperdir
- Open file in D indirectly via private overlayfs and edit it
So it does not require any special privileges to circumvent generating
events. Unless I am missing something.
Thanks,
Amir.
