Date:   Sat, 11 May 2019 10:00:47 -0700
From:   Andy Lutomirski <luto@...capital.net>
To:     Jann Horn <jannh@...gle.com>
Cc:     Andy Lutomirski <luto@...nel.org>,
        Aleksa Sarai <cyphar@...har.com>,
        Al Viro <viro@...iv.linux.org.uk>,
        Jeff Layton <jlayton@...nel.org>,
        "J. Bruce Fields" <bfields@...ldses.org>,
        Arnd Bergmann <arnd@...db.de>,
        David Howells <dhowells@...hat.com>,
        Eric Biederman <ebiederm@...ssion.com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Alexei Starovoitov <ast@...nel.org>,
        Kees Cook <keescook@...omium.org>,
        Christian Brauner <christian@...uner.io>,
        Tycho Andersen <tycho@...ho.ws>,
        David Drysdale <drysdale@...gle.com>,
        Chanho Min <chanho.min@....com>,
        Oleg Nesterov <oleg@...hat.com>, Aleksa Sarai <asarai@...e.de>,
        Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Linux Containers <containers@...ts.linux-foundation.org>,
        linux-fsdevel <linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Linux API <linux-api@...r.kernel.org>,
        kernel list <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        linux-arch <linux-arch@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v6 5/6] binfmt_*: scope path resolution of interpreters



> On May 10, 2019, at 3:55 PM, Jann Horn <jannh@...gle.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, May 10, 2019 at 02:20:23PM -0700, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
>>> On Fri, May 10, 2019 at 1:41 PM Jann Horn <jannh@...gle.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> On Tue, May 07, 2019 at 05:17:35AM +1000, Aleksa Sarai wrote:
>>>>> On 2019-05-06, Jann Horn <jannh@...gle.com> wrote:
>>>>> In my opinion, CVE-2019-5736 points out two different problems:
>>>>> 
>>>>> The big problem: The __ptrace_may_access() logic has a special-case
>>>>> short-circuit for "introspection" that you can't opt out of; this
>>>>> makes it possible to open things in procfs that are related to the
>>>>> current process even if the credentials of the process wouldn't permit
>>>>> accessing another process like it. I think the proper fix to deal with
>>>>> this would be to add a prctl() flag for "set whether introspection is
>>>>> allowed for this process", and if userspace has manually un-set that
>>>>> flag, any introspection special-case logic would be skipped.
>>>> 
>>>> We could do PR_SET_DUMPABLE=3 for this, I guess?
>>> 
>>> Hmm... I'd make it a new prctl() command, since introspection is
>>> somewhat orthogonal to dumpability. Also, dumpability is per-mm, and I
>>> think the introspection flag should be per-thread.
>> 
>> I've lost track of the context here, but it seems to me that
>> mitigating attacks involving accidental following of /proc links
>> shouldn't depend on dumpability.  What's the actual problem this is
>> trying to solve again?
> 
> The one actual security problem that I've seen related to this is
> CVE-2019-5736. There is a write-up of it at
> <https://blog.dragonsector.pl/2019/02/cve-2019-5736-escape-from-docker-and.html>
> under "Successful approach", but it goes more or less as follows:
> 
> A container is running that doesn't use user namespaces (because for
> some reason I don't understand, apparently some people still do that).
> An evil process is running inside the container with UID 0 (as in,
> GLOBAL_ROOT_UID); so if the evil process inside the container was able
> to reach root-owned files on the host filesystem, it could write into
> them.
> 
> The container engine wants to spawn a new process inside the container.
> It forks off a child that joins the container's namespaces (including
> PID and mount namespaces), and then the child calls execve() on some
> path in the container.

I think that, at this point, the task should be considered owned by the container.  Maybe we should have a better API than execve() to execute a program in a safer way, but fiddling with dumpability seems like a band-aid.  In fact, the process is arguably pwned even *before* execve.

A better “spawn” API should fix this.  In the mean time, I think it should be assumed that, if you join a container’s namespaces, you are at its mercy.

> The attacker replaces the executable in the container with a symlink
> to /proc/self/exe and replaces a library inside the container with a
> malicious one.

Cute.

> When the container engine calls execve(), intending to run an executable
> inside the container, it instead goes through ptrace_may_access() using
> the introspection short-circuit and re-executes its own executable
> through the jumped symlink /proc/self/exe (which is normally unreachable
> for the container). After the execve(), the process loads an evil
> library from inside the container and is under the control of the
> container.
> Now the container controls a process whose /proc/self/exe is a jumped
> symlink to a host executable, and the container can write into it.
> 
> Some container engines are now using an extremely ugly hack to work
> around this - whenever they want to enter a container, they copy the
> host binary into a new memfd and execute that to avoid exposing the
> original host binary to containers:
> <https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/commit/0a8e4117e7f715d5fbeef398405813ce8e88558b>
> 
> 
> In my opinion, the problems here are:
> 
> - Apparently some people run untrusted containers without user
>   namespaces. It would be really nice if people could not do that.
>   (Probably the biggest problem here.)

> - ptrace_may_access() has a short-circuit that permits a process to
>   unintentionally look at itself even if it has dropped privileges -
>   here, it permits the execve("/proc/self/exe", ...) that would
>   normally be blocked by the check for CAP_SYS_PTRACE if the process
>   is nondumpable.

I don’t see this as a problem.  Dumpable is about protecting a task from others, not about protecting a task against itself.

> - You can use /proc/*/exe to get a writable fd.

This is IMO the real bug.

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