Date:	Thu, 07 Jul 2011 18:55:38 -0700
From:	Allison Henderson <achender@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>
To:	Amir Goldstein <amir73il@...il.com>
CC:	Andreas Dilger <adilger@...ger.ca>, linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/2 v3] EXT4: Secure Delete: Zero out file data

On 07/07/2011 05:09 PM, Amir Goldstein wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 11:19 PM, Allison Henderson
> <achender@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>  wrote:
>> On 07/07/2011 12:52 PM, Andreas Dilger wrote:
>>>
>>> On 2011-07-07, at 1:05 AM, Amir Goldstein wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 12:05 AM, Allison Henderson
>>>> <achender@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>    wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> On 07/02/2011 02:33 AM, Amir Goldstein wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 12:22 AM, Allison Henderson
>>>>>> <achender@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>     wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> @@ -4485,6 +4485,14 @@ void ext4_free_blocks(handle_t *handle, struct
>>>>>>> inode *inode,
>>>>>>>         ext4_debug("freeing block %llu\n", block);
>>>>>>>         trace_ext4_free_blocks(inode, block, count, flags);
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> +       if (flags&     EXT4_FREE_BLOCKS_ZERO) {
>>>>>>> +               err = sb_issue_zeroout(inode->i_sb, block, count,
>>>>>>> GFP_NOFS);
>>>>>>
>>>>>> But the delete of these blocks in not yet committed,
>>>>>> so after reboot, you can end up with a non-deleted but zeroed file
>>>>>> data.
>>>>>> Is that acceptable? I should think not.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> One way around this is a 2-phase unlink/truncate.
>>>>>> Phase 1: add to orphan list and register a callback on commit
>>>>>> Phase 2: issue zeroout and free the blocks
>>>>>>
>>>>>> This won't work for punch hole, but then again, for punch hole
>>>>>> it's probably OK to end up with zeroed data, but non-deleted blocks.
>>>>>> Right?
>>>>>
>>>>> Hi, I had a quick question about the orphan list.  I notice that
>>>>> ext4_ext_truncate and also ext4_ext_punch_hole already have a call to
>>>>> ext4_orphan_add that happens really early before any calls to free
>>>>> blocks.
>>>>>   Does this address your earlier concerns, or is there another reason I
>>>>> missed?  Thx!
>>>>
>>>> It doesn't address the concerns of getting a non-deleted file with zeroed
>>>> data
>>>> after crash, because the existence of the inode on the orphan list after
>>>> crash
>>>> depends on the transaction that added it to the list being committed.
>>>> And your patch zeroes the blocks before that transaction is committed.
>>>>
>>>> However, the orphan list gives you a very good framework to implement
>>>> deferred delete (by a kernel thread) as Andreas suggested.
>>>> Unlink should be simple, because freeing unlinked inode blocks it is
>>>> anyway
>>>> deferred till the inode refcount drops to zero.
>>>
>>> Right.  The patch that I referenced moved all of the blocks from unlink
>>> and truncate-to-zero from the current inode to a new temporary inode on
>>> the
>>> orphan list (simply copying the i_blocks field + i_block and i_size, IIRC,
>>> and zeroing them on the original inode).
>>>
>>>> Truncate is more tricky, because of the truncate shrink/extend
>>>> requirement
>>>> (that all data is zeroes after extending the inode's size via truncate
>>>> system call), so a shrinking-deferred truncate would have to mark all the
>>>> to-be-deleted extents uninitialized.
>>>
>>> It would be possible to do this for partial truncate/punch as well, to
>>> move whole blocks over to a new inode on the orphan list and zeroing only
>>> the 1 or 2 partial blocks inline.
>>>
>>> It should even be possible to leverage the "block migrate" facility used
>>> by defrag, so that we don't duplicate this code.  That would mean just
>>> allocating a temp "unlink" inode in the kernel and putting it on the
>>> orphan
>>> list (like an open-unlinked file), migrate the selected range of blocks,
>>> and then zeroing the blocks in the background before unlinking the inode.
>>>
>>> I don't think that just marking the deleted extents as uninitialized is
>>> enough, since it would still leave "private" data on disk that could be
>>> read afterward.  This would also only work for extent-mapped filesystems.
>>>
>>> There may need to be some work to enable the migrate code on block-mapped
>>> files, if you want to allow secure-delete on those files, but that is good
>>> IMHO since it also means that we could defrag block-mapped files.
>>>
>>> Cheers, Andreas
>>>
>>
>> Ah, ok then.  Yes, part of the requirements was to make secure delete work
>> for partial truncates, punch hole, and also indexed files.  So that will
>> save me some time if I can get the migrate routines work.  Thx for the
>> pointers all!
>>
>
> I realized that there is a basic flaw in the concept of deferred-secure-delete.
>  From a security point of view, after a crash during a secure-delete,
> if the file is not there, all its data should have been wiped.
> Orphan cleanup on the next mount may be done on a system that
> doesn't respect secure delete.
> So for real security, the unlink/truncate command cannot return before
> all data is wiped.
> The unlink/truncate metadata changes must not even be committed
> before all data is wiped (or at least part of the data with partial truncate).
>
> Amir.


I see, so then it sounds like using a background thread to do the 
zeroing would not help us if we have to wait for it complete anyway. 
Going back to the 2 phase approach, this means that we need to do the 
zero out and then the free before we do the orphan list and commit? 
Just trying to make sure I understand things correctly :)

Allison Henderson
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