linux-hardening - Re: Isolating abstract sockets

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Message-ID: <20231024141807.GB321218@mail.hallyn.com>
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2023 09:18:07 -0500
From: "Serge E. Hallyn" <serge@...lyn.com>
To: Paul Moore <paul@...l-moore.com>
Cc: "Serge E. Hallyn" <serge@...lyn.com>,
	Stefan Bavendiek <stefan.bavendiek@...lbox.org>,
	kernel-hardening@...ts.openwall.com,
	linux-hardening@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Isolating abstract sockets

On Tue, Oct 24, 2023 at 10:14:29AM -0400, Paul Moore wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 24, 2023 at 9:46 AM Serge E. Hallyn <serge@...lyn.com> wrote:
> > On Sun, Dec 18, 2022 at 08:29:10PM +0100, Stefan Bavendiek wrote:
> > > When building userspace application sandboxes, one issue that does not seem trivial to solve is the isolation of abstract sockets.
> >
> > Veeery late reply.  Have you had any productive discussions about this in
> > other threads or venues?
> >
> > > While most IPC mechanism can be isolated by mechanisms like mount namespaces, abstract sockets are part of the network namespace.
> > > It is possible to isolate abstract sockets by using a new network namespace, however, unprivileged processes can only create a new empty network namespace, which removes network access as well and makes this useless for network clients.
> > >
> > > Same linux sandbox projects try to solve this by bridging the existing network interfaces into the new namespace or use something like slirp4netns to archive this, but this does not look like an ideal solution to this problem, especially since sandboxing should reduce the kernel attack surface without introducing more complexity.
> > >
> > > Aside from containers using namespaces, sandbox implementations based on seccomp and landlock would also run into the same problem, since landlock only provides file system isolation and seccomp cannot filter the path argument and therefore it can only be used to block new unix domain socket connections completely.
> > >
> > > Currently there does not seem to be any way to disable network namespaces in the kernel without also disabling unix domain sockets.
> > >
> > > The question is how to solve the issue of abstract socket isolation in a clean and efficient way, possibly even without namespaces.
> > > What would be the ideal way to implement a mechanism to disable abstract sockets either globally or even better, in the context of a process.
> > > And would such a patch have a realistic chance to make it into the kernel?
> >
> > Disabling them altogether would break lots of things depending on them,
> > like X :)  (@/tmp/.X11-unix/X0).  The other path is to reconsider network
> > namespaces.  There are several directions this could lead.  For one, as
> > Dinesh Subhraveti often points out, the current "network" namespace is
> > really a network device namespace.  If we instead namespace at the
> > bind/connect/etc calls, we end up with much different abilities.
> 
> The LSM layer supports access controls on abstract sockets, with at
> least two (AppArmor, SELinux) providing abstract socket access
> controls, other LSMs may provide controls as well.

Good point.  And for Stefan that may suffice, so thanks for mentioning
that.  But The LSM layer is mandatory access control for use by the
admins.  That doesn't help an unprivileged user.