On 2/17/20 3:06 AM, Alexey Budankov wrote:
Introduce CAP_PERFMON capability designed to secure system performance monitoring and observability operations so that CAP_PERFMON would assist CAP_SYS_ADMIN capability in its governing role for performance monitoring and observability subsystems. CAP_PERFMON hardens system security and integrity during performance monitoring and observability operations by decreasing attack surface that is available to a CAP_SYS_ADMIN privileged process [2]. Providing the access to system performance monitoring and observability operations under CAP_PERFMON capability singly, without the rest of CAP_SYS_ADMIN credentials, excludes chances to misuse the credentials and makes the operation more secure. Thus, CAP_PERFMON implements the principal of least privilege for performance monitoring and observability operations (POSIX IEEE 1003.1e: 2.2.2.39 principle of least privilege: A security design principle that states that a process or program be granted only those privileges (e.g., capabilities) necessary to accomplish its legitimate function, and only for the time that such privileges are actually required) CAP_PERFMON meets the demand to secure system performance monitoring and observability operations for adoption in security sensitive, restricted, multiuser production environments (e.g. HPC clusters, cloud and virtual compute environments), where root or CAP_SYS_ADMIN credentials are not available to mass users of a system, and securely unblocks accessibility of system performance monitoring and observability operations beyond the root and CAP_SYS_ADMIN use cases. CAP_PERFMON takes over CAP_SYS_ADMIN credentials related to system performance monitoring and observability operations and balances amount of CAP_SYS_ADMIN credentials following the recommendations in the capabilities man page [1] for CAP_SYS_ADMIN: "Note: this capability is overloaded; see Notes to kernel developers, below." For backward compatibility reasons access to system performance monitoring and observability subsystems of the kernel remains open for CAP_SYS_ADMIN privileged processes but CAP_SYS_ADMIN usage for secure system performance monitoring and observability operations is discouraged with respect to the designed CAP_PERFMON capability. Although the software running under CAP_PERFMON can not ensure avoidance of related hardware issues, the software can still mitigate these issues following the official hardware issues mitigation procedure [2]. The bugs in the software itself can be fixed following the standard kernel development process [3] to maintain and harden security of system performance monitoring and observability operations. [1] http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/capabilities.7.html [2] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/embargoed-hardware-issues.html [3] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/security-bugs.html Signed-off-by: Alexey Budankov <alexey.budankov@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Acked-by: Stephen Smalley <sds@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> [...]
