On Mon, 17 Feb 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> Reviewed-by: James Morris <jamorris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> -- James Morris <jmorris@xxxxxxxxx>
