linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] Check files' signatures before doing suid/sgid [2/4]

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Message-ID: <a781481a0706251913x73a5680ej33a0e2ac61bad418@mail.gmail.com>
Date:	Tue, 26 Jun 2007 07:43:34 +0530
From:	"Satyam Sharma" <satyam.sharma@...il.com>
To:	"Alexander Wuerstlein" <snalwuer@....informatik.uni-erlangen.de>
Cc:	"Alexander Wuerstlein" <arw@....name>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	"Johannes Schlumberger" <spjsschl@...d.informatik.uni-erlangen.de>,
	linux-crypto@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Check files' signatures before doing suid/sgid [2/4]

On 6/26/07, Alexander Wuerstlein
<snalwuer@....informatik.uni-erlangen.de> wrote:
> [...]
> Nope. I unluckily wrote 'userspace' where I should have said something else:
> Chain-of-trust is handled in what I would label 'Adminspace' (Where we do the
> signing as in points 1 and 2). There is a very small number of signatures (in
> our example one) known to the kernel and only those are trusted, and those are
> applied to the binaries by the administrator in your point 2. The kernel does
> and should never rely on userspace to tell it which signatures are trustworthy.
> Only the administrator may do so by means of the signatures directly compiled
> into the kernel.
>
> So in short: Chain-of-trust is handled by the administrator in his secure
> central location.

Ok, so the "trust chain" you're talking about is simply the decision of the
admin to compile-in the (verified and trusted) public keys of known trusted
entities into the kernel at build time. That is not really scalable, but I guess
you might just as well impose such a restriction for sake of simplicity.

[ I initially thought a scenario where a given binary is signed by an
entity whose
corresponding public key is _not_ present in the kernel, but who does possess
a signature -- over its name, id and public key -- by another entity whose
corresponding public key _is_ built into the kernel). Then at the time of
verification there's really no other alternative to *build* the entire
chain at the
_point of verification_ (in-kernel) itself ... but this obviously
introduces huge and
ugly complexities that you'd have a hard time bringing into the kernel :-) That
"signature over name, id and public key" could be a _certificate_ (if you care
about following standards), and building their chains in-kernel ... well. But if
you really want to differentiate between kernel and userspace from security
perspective, and want to give such functionality, I don't see any easy
way out. ]

> >> So far for the initial idea. Perhaps it would be useful to have more than
> >> one
> >> key or some more complex scheme for obtaining the keys and checking their
> >> validity.  But as all of this would need to be part of the kernel we
> >> decided to
> >> rather keep it as simple as possible, anything complex is better and more
> >> flexibly done in userspace.
> >
> > Well, if you're trusting (privileged) userspace already, I'm suddenly not so
> > sure as to what new is this patchset bringing to the table in the first place
> > ...
>
> We do not trust any userspace application, see above.
>
> > could you also describe the attack vectors / threats that you had in mind
> > that get blocked with the proposed scheme?
>
> We focus on attacks where an attacker may alter some executable file, for
> example by altering a mounted nfs-share, manipulating disk-content by simply
> pulling a disk, mounting it and writing to it, etc.
>
> This relies on the kernel beeing trustworthy of course, so one would need to
> take special measures to protect the kernel-image from beeing similarly
> altered. One (somewhat not-so-secure method) would be supplying kernel images
> by PXE and forbidding local booting, another measure would be using a TPM
> and an appropriate bootloader to check the kernel for unwanted modifications.

Kernel-userspace differentiation from security perspective is always tricky
(so this is why I pointed you to the discussions whenever such stuff, such
as asymmetric crypto and modsign etc are proposed to be merged). It's
definitely not impossible to compromise a _running_ kernel from privileged
userspace, if it really wanted to do so ...

Satyam
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