linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 1/3] ptrace: ptrace_attach: check PF_KTHREAD + exit

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Date:	Sat, 9 May 2009 20:43:03 +0200
From:	Oleg Nesterov <oleg@...hat.com>
To:	Roland McGrath <roland@...hat.com>
Cc:	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Chris Wright <chrisw@...s-sol.org>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/3] ptrace: ptrace_attach: check PF_KTHREAD +
	exit_state instead of ->mm

On 05/06, Roland McGrath wrote:
>
> > We can preserve the current behaviour, we can do get_task_mm() beforehand,
> > modify __ptrace_may_access() a bit, and call __ptrace_may_access() under
> > tasklist later (in fact, this was the very first version of this patch which
> > I didn't send).
>
> Perhaps there is a way to reorder the patches that makes it simpler?
>
> On second look, what does __ptrace_may_access() need task_lock() for anyway?

Just for get_dumpable(task->mm), I think.

> > But do we really care? If selinux denies to ptrace this task, can't we
> > return -EACESS regardless of ->ptrace?
>
> You're right that the return code is the same either way.  That's not the
> issue.  The issue is whether this case calls security_ptrace_may_access()
> at all, because doing so can have side effects.  Consider an application
> that does:
>
> 	ptrace(PTRACE_ATTACH, pid);
> 	ptrace(PTRACE_ATTACH, pid);
> 	pid = wait(&status);
>
> It works fine, because it doesn't care that the second call fails.
> (A real-world example would be much more complex, with mounds of poorly
> structured code so nobody can even tell what calls have already been made.
> Maybe the first one would really have been the child doing PTRACE_TRACEME,
> or inheriting via CLONE_PTRACE/PTRACE_O_TRACECLONE, etc.)
>
> After your change, the application still works fine by itself.  But now,
> the second call causes a security_ptrace_may_access() call that wasn't
> there before.  This hits some crazy LSM arrangement we haven't even
> thought of, and produces auditing complaints about improper ptrace
> attempts.  Those log messages on a server trigger some fancy monitoring
> thing that identifies them as unexpected and security-related, decides
> that means they're urgent, and so pages the poor sysadmin and his boss
> and his boss's boss with bright red "BREAK-IN ATTEMPTED IN THE
> DATACENTER" pages vibrating their beltlines right when their hot dates
> were about to get interesting.  The poor sysadmin spends the next month
> of his life in rat holes of wild paranoia and reinstalling, and then
> eventually in tedious explanations of how there was never any intrusion
> but he'd just done an innocuous kernel upgrade that he knew was not
> supposed to change any application behavior.

OK, so this change is not purely cosmetic as I thought.

We can fix this in many ways. We can extract the ->cred and ->mm checks
from __ptrace_may_access() into another helper which is called before
write_lock(tasklist), and then call security_ptrace_may_access under tasklist.
Or we can do get_task_mm() in advance and call __ptrace_may_access() without
task_lock().

Or, perhaps, we can just check ->ptrace before __ptrace_may_access()
lockless (just to prevent the scenario above), and then check it again
under tasklist? This looks like a simplest option.

Oleg.

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