SELinux tries to support setting/clearing of /proc/pid/attr attributes from the shell by ignoring terminating newlines and treating an attribute value that begins with a NUL or newline as an attempt to clear the attribute. However, the test for clearing attributes has always been wrong; it has an off-by-one error, and this could further lead to reading past the end of the allocated buffer since commit bb646cdb12e75d82258c2f2e7746d5952d3e321a ("proc_pid_attr_write(): switch to memdup_user()"). Fix the off-by-one error. Even with this fix, setting and clearing /proc/pid/attr attributes from the shell is not straightforward since the interface does not support multiple write() calls (so shells that write the value and newline separately will set and then immediately clear the attribute, requiring use of echo -n to set the attribute), whereas trying to use echo -n "" to clear the attribute causes the shell to skip the write() call altogether since POSIX says that a zero-length write causes no side effects. Thus, one must use echo -n to set and echo without -n to clear, as in the following example: $ echo -n unconfined_u:object_r:user_home_t:s0 > /proc/$$/attr/fscreate $ cat /proc/$$/attr/fscreate unconfined_u:object_r:user_home_t:s0 $ echo "" > /proc/$$/attr/fscreate $ cat /proc/$$/attr/fscreate Note the use of /proc/$$ rather than /proc/self, as otherwise the cat command will read its own attribute value, not that of the shell. There are no users of this facility to my knowledge; possibly we should just get rid of it. Signed-off-by: Stephen Smalley <sds@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> --- security/selinux/hooks.c | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/security/selinux/hooks.c b/security/selinux/hooks.c index a5398fe..6a047bf 100644 --- a/security/selinux/hooks.c +++ b/security/selinux/hooks.c @@ -5882,7 +5882,7 @@ static int selinux_setprocattr(const char *name, void *value, size_t size) return error; /* Obtain a SID for the context, if one was specified. */ - if (size && str[1] && str[1] != '\n') { + if (size && str[0] && str[0] != '\n') { if (str[size-1] == '\n') { str[size-1] = 0; size--; -- 2.7.4 _______________________________________________ Selinux mailing list Selinux@xxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe, send email to Selinux-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxx. To get help, send an email containing "help" to Selinux-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.