linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 2/2] file capabilities: accomodate >32 bit capabilities

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Message-ID: <20070510200127.GH6375@schatzie.adilger.int>
Date:	Thu, 10 May 2007 13:01:27 -0700
From:	Andreas Dilger <adilger@...sterfs.com>
To:	"Serge E. Hallyn" <serue@...ibm.com>
Cc:	lkml <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	linux-fsdevel <linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org>,
	James Morris <jmorris@...ei.org>,
	Stephen Smalley <sds@...ho.nsa.gov>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	jeffschroeder@...puter.org, Chris Wright <chrisw@...s-sol.org>,
	Karl MacMillan <kmacmillan@...talrootkit.com>,
	KaiGai Kohei <kaigai@...gai.gr.jp>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/2] file capabilities: accomodate >32 bit capabilities

On May 08, 2007  16:49 -0500, Serge E. Hallyn wrote:
> Quoting Andreas Dilger (adilger@...sterfs.com):
> > One of the important use cases I can see today is the ability to
> > split the heavily-overloaded e.g. CAP_SYS_ADMIN into much more fine
> > grained attributes.
> 
> Sounds plausible, though it suffers from both making capabilities far
> more cumbersome (i.e. finding the right capability for what you wanted
> to do) and backward compatibility.  Perhaps at that point we should
> introduce security.capabilityv2 xattrs.  A binary can then carry
> security.capability=CAP_SYS_ADMIN=p, and
> security.capabilityv2=cap_may_clone_mntns=p.

Well, the overhead of each EA is non-trivial (16 bytes/EA) for storing
12 bytes worth of data, so it is probably just better to keep extending
the original capability fields as was in the proposal.

> > What we definitely do NOT want to happen is an application that needs
> > priviledged access (e.g. e2fsck, mount) to stop running because the
> > new capabilities _would_ have been granted by the new kernel and are
> > not by the old kernel and STRICTXATTR is used.
> > 
> > To me it would seem that having extra capabilities on an old kernel
> > is relatively harmless if the old kernel doesn't know what they are.
> > It's like having a key to a door that you don't know where it is.
> 
> If we ditch the STRICTXATTR option do the semantics seem sane to you?

Seems reasonable.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Principal Software Engineer
Cluster File Systems, Inc.

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