linux-kernel - Re: [Security] [PATCH 2/2] taskstats: restrict access to user

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Date:	Mon, 19 Sep 2011 22:50:02 +0530
From:	Balbir Singh <bsingharora@...il.com>
To:	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
Cc:	Vasiliy Kulikov <segoon@...nwall.com>,
	Shailabh Nagar <nagar@...ibm.com>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, security@...nel.org,
	Eric Paris <eparis@...hat.com>,
	Stephen Wilson <wilsons@...rt.ca>,
	KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@...fujitsu.com>,
	David Rientjes <rientjes@...gle.com>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Balbir Singh <balbir@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>,
	kernel-hardening@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: [Security] [PATCH 2/2] taskstats: restrict access to user

On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 10:10 PM, Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@...ux-foundation.org> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 8:02 PM, Balbir Singh <bsingharora@...il.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> So that's why I think it should be marked BROKEN. What applications
> >> actually depend on this? iotop and what else? Because if it's just
> >> iotop, I do suspect we might be better off telling people "ok,
> >> disabling this will break iotop, but quite frankly, you're better off
> >> without it".
> >
> > I beg to differ, due to the reasons above. I'd rather find time and
> > fix the pending issues (network namespace), you've fixed the pid
> > namespace issue. I'd also look for exiting listeners
>
> So nothing ever happened on this thread, afaik.
>
> You can still read sensitive information at a byte granularity with taskstats.
>
> Balbir never sent any of the fixes he was supposed to, and none of the
> namespace issues have gotten fixed.
>
> It's now almost three months later, and things are still equally broken.
>
> I think we need to just disable TASKSTAT's. Nobody maintains it, it's
> been a known issue for months, people pointed out problems and even
> sent patches, and nothing happened.
>
> Maybe we can minimize it with the appended patch, but dammit, we need
> to do *something*. If I don't get any reasonable replies, I'm really
> going to have to mark this as known-BROKEN, since nothing ever
> happens, and the "maintainer" clearly doesn't care about security
> issues.
>

Sorry, I've been bogged down with work issues and have not had time to
look at it. If someone else wants to take a look while I am busy, I'd
be happy. The patch you've sent seems reasonable, but I'd suggest a
changelog

"Change taskstats user interface, henceforth we need (for security
purposes) CAP_SYS_ADMIN to receive taskstats
data on a particular CPU, a subset or all CPUs on the system. The
patch also rounds the data returned to the KiloByte
boundary for IO parameters, read_bytes, write_bytes and cancelled_write_bytes"

Thanks for looking into this.
Balbir
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