linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 4/5] kprobes: Do not expose probe addresses to non-CAP

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Date:   Thu, 2 Jul 2020 18:00:17 -0700
From:   Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
To:     Kees Cook <keescook@...omium.org>
Cc:     Dominik Czarnota <dominik.czarnota@...ilofbits.com>,
        stable <stable@...r.kernel.org>, Jessica Yu <jeyu@...nel.org>,
        Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Alexei Starovoitov <ast@...nel.org>,
        Daniel Borkmann <daniel@...earbox.net>,
        Martin KaFai Lau <kafai@...com>,
        Song Liu <songliubraving@...com>, Yonghong Song <yhs@...com>,
        Andrii Nakryiko <andriin@...com>,
        KP Singh <kpsingh@...omium.org>,
        "Naveen N. Rao" <naveen.n.rao@...ux.ibm.com>,
        Anil S Keshavamurthy <anil.s.keshavamurthy@...el.com>,
        "David S. Miller" <davem@...emloft.net>,
        Masami Hiramatsu <mhiramat@...nel.org>,
        Jakub Kicinski <kuba@...nel.org>,
        "Steven Rostedt (VMware)" <rostedt@...dmis.org>,
        Dmitry Safonov <0x7f454c46@...il.com>,
        Will Deacon <will@...nel.org>,
        Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@...il.com>,
        Marc Zyngier <maz@...nel.org>,
        Masahiro Yamada <masahiroy@...nel.org>,
        Al Viro <viro@...iv.linux.org.uk>,
        Matteo Croce <mcroce@...hat.com>,
        Edward Cree <ecree@...arflare.com>,
        Nicolas Dichtel <nicolas.dichtel@...nd.com>,
        Alexander Lobakin <alobakin@...nk.ru>,
        Thomas Richter <tmricht@...ux.ibm.com>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@...nel.org>,
        Netdev <netdev@...r.kernel.org>, bpf <bpf@...r.kernel.org>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 4/5] kprobes: Do not expose probe addresses to non-CAP_SYSLOG

On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 4:26 PM Kees Cook <keescook@...omium.org> wrote:
>
> The kprobe show() functions were using "current"'s creds instead
> of the file opener's creds for kallsyms visibility. Fix to use
> seq_file->file->f_cred.

Side note: I have a distinct - but despite that possibly quite
incorrect - memory that I've discussed with somebody several years ago
about making "current_cred()" simply warn in any IO context.

IOW, we could have read and write just increment/decrement a
per-thread counter, and have current_cred() do a WARN_ON_ONCE() if
it's called with that counter incremented.

The issue of ioctl's is a bit less obvious - there are reasons to
argue those should also use open-time credentials, but on the other
hand I think it's reasonable to pass a file descriptor to a suid app
in order for that app to do things that the normal user cannot.

But read/write are dangerous because of the "it's so easy to fool suid
apps to read/write stdin/stdout".

So pread/pwrite/ioctl/splice etc are things that suid applications
very much do on purpose to affect a file descriptor. But plain
read/write are things that might be accidental and used by attack
vectors.

If somebody is interested in looking into things like that, it might
be a good idea to have kernel threads with that counter incremented by
default.

Just throwing this idea out in case somebody wants to try it. It's not
just "current_cred", of course. It's all the current_cred_xxx() users
too. But it may be that there are a ton of false positives because
maybe some code on purpose ends up doing things like just *comparing*
current_cred with file->f_cred and then that would warn too.

              Linus