On Tue, 28 Jan 2020, Alexey Budankov wrote: > > Open access to monitoring via kprobes and uprobes and eBPF tracing for > CAP_PERFMON privileged process. Providing the access under CAP_PERFMON > capability singly, without the rest of CAP_SYS_ADMIN credentials, excludes > chances to misuse the credentials and makes operation more secure. > > perf kprobes and uprobes are used by ftrace and eBPF. perf probe uses > ftrace to define new kprobe events, and those events are treated as > tracepoint events. eBPF defines new probes via perf_event_open interface > and then the probes are used in eBPF tracing. > > 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) > > For backward compatibility reasons access to perf_events subsystem remains > open for CAP_SYS_ADMIN privileged processes but CAP_SYS_ADMIN usage for > secure perf_events monitoring is discouraged with respect to CAP_PERFMON > capability. > > Signed-off-by: Alexey Budankov <alexey.budankov@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > --- > kernel/events/core.c | 4 ++-- > 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) Acked-by: James Morris <jamorris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> -- James Morris <jmorris@xxxxxxxxx>
