linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] capabilities: add capability cgroup controller

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Message-ID: <CALCETrUBLxL116XrD6V9--H17q84KrMTYHm8UJF_kO3Reoh2pw@mail.gmail.com>
Date:	Thu, 23 Jun 2016 21:15:43 -0700
From:	Andy Lutomirski <luto@...capital.net>
To:	Topi Miettinen <toiwoton@...il.com>
Cc:	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	"linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Andrew Lutomirski <luto@...nel.org>,
	"Serge E. Hallyn" <serge@...lyn.com>,
	Kees Cook <keescook@...omium.org>,
	Jonathan Corbet <corbet@....net>, Tejun Heo <tj@...nel.org>,
	Li Zefan <lizefan@...wei.com>,
	Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org>,
	Serge Hallyn <serge.hallyn@...onical.com>,
	James Morris <james.l.morris@...cle.com>,
	David Howells <dhowells@...hat.com>,
	David Woodhouse <David.Woodhouse@...el.com>,
	Ard Biesheuvel <ard.biesheuvel@...aro.org>,
	"Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>,
	Petr Mladek <pmladek@...e.com>,
	"open list:DOCUMENTATION" <linux-doc@...r.kernel.org>,
	"open list:CONTROL GROUP (CGROUP)" <cgroups@...r.kernel.org>,
	"open list:CAPABILITIES" <linux-security-module@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] capabilities: add capability cgroup controller

On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 6:14 PM, Topi Miettinen <toiwoton@...il.com> wrote:
> On 06/23/16 23:46, Andrew Morton wrote:
>> On Thu, 23 Jun 2016 18:07:10 +0300 Topi Miettinen <toiwoton@...il.com> wrote:
>>
>>> There are many basic ways to control processes, including capabilities,
>>> cgroups and resource limits. However, there are far fewer ways to find
>>> out useful values for the limits, except blind trial and error.
>>>
>>> Currently, there is no way to know which capabilities are actually used.
>>> Even the source code is only implicit, in-depth knowledge of each
>>> capability must be used when analyzing a program to judge which
>>> capabilities the program will exercise.
>>>
>>> Add a new cgroup controller for monitoring of capabilities
>>> in the cgroup.
>>
>> I'm having trouble understanding how valuable this feature is to our
>> users, and that's a rather important thing!
>>
>> Perhaps it would help if you were to explain your motivation:
>> particular use cases which benefited from this, for example.
>>
>
> It's easy to control with for example systemd or many other tools, which
> capabilities a service should have at the start. But how should a system
> administrator, application developer or distro maintaner ever determine
> a suitable value for this? Currently the only way seems to be to become
> an expert on capabilities, make an educated guess how the set of
> programs in question happen to work in this context and especially how
> they could exercise the capabilites in all possible use cases. Even
> then, the outcome is to just try something to see if that happens to
> work. Reading the source code (if available) does not help very much,
> because the use of capabilities is anything but explicit there.
>
> This is way too difficult, there must be some easier way. The
> information which capabilities actually were used in a trial run gives a
> much better starting point. The users can just use the list of used
> capabilities with configuring the service or when developing or
> maintaining the application. Of course, even that could still fail
> eventually, but then you simply copy the new value of used capabilities
> to the configuration, whereas currently you have to reconsider your
> understanding of the capabilities and the programs in light of the
> failure, which by itself might give no new useful information.
>
> One way to solve this for good would be to make the use of capabilities
> explicit in the ABI. For example, there could be a system call
> dac_override() which would be the only possible way ever to use the
> capability CAP_DAC_OVERRIDE and so forth. Then reading source code,
> tracing and many other approaches would be useful. But the OS with that
> kind of ABI (not Linux) would not be Unix-like at all for any
> (potentially) capability using programs, like find(1) or cat(1).

The problem is that most of the capabilities are so powerful on their
own that limiting services to just a few may be all but useless.

--Andy