Date:   Thu, 15 Aug 2019 17:54:59 -0700
From:   Andy Lutomirski <luto@...capital.net>
To:     Alexei Starovoitov <alexei.starovoitov@...il.com>
Cc:     Kees Cook <keescook@...omium.org>,
        Andy Lutomirski <luto@...nel.org>,
        Song Liu <songliubraving@...com>,
        Networking <netdev@...r.kernel.org>, bpf <bpf@...r.kernel.org>,
        Alexei Starovoitov <ast@...nel.org>,
        Daniel Borkmann <daniel@...earbox.net>,
        Kernel Team <Kernel-team@...com>,
        Lorenz Bauer <lmb@...udflare.com>,
        Jann Horn <jannh@...gle.com>,
        Greg KH <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>,
        Linux API <linux-api@...r.kernel.org>,
        LSM List <linux-security-module@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 bpf-next 1/4] bpf: unprivileged BPF access via /dev/bpf



> On Aug 15, 2019, at 4:46 PM, Alexei Starovoitov <alexei.starovoitov@...il.com> wrote:


>> 
>> I'm not sure why you draw the line for VMs -- they're just as buggy
>> as anything else. Regardless, I reject this line of thinking: yes,
>> all software is buggy, but that isn't a reason to give up.
> 
> hmm. are you saying you want kernel community to work towards
> making containers (namespaces) being able to run arbitrary code
> downloaded from the internet?

Yes.

As an example, Sandstorm uses a combination of namespaces (user, network, mount, ipc) and a moderately permissive seccomp policy to run arbitrary code. Not just little snippets, either — node.js, Mongo, MySQL, Meteor, and other fairly heavyweight stacks can all run under Sandstorm, with the whole stack (database engine binaries, etc) supplied by entirely untrusted customers.  During the time Sandstorm was under active development, I can recall *one* bug that would have allowed a sandbox escape. That’s a pretty good track record.  (Also, Meltdown and Spectre, sigh.)

To be clear, Sandstorm did not allow creation of a userns by the untrusted code, and Sandstorm would have heavily restricted bpf(), but that should only be necessary because of the possibility of kernel bugs, not because of the overall design.

Alexei, I’m trying to encourage you to aim for something even better than you have now. Right now, if you grant a user various very strong capabilities, that user’s systemd can use bpf network filters.  Your proposal would allow this with a different, but still very strong, set of capabilities. There’s nothing wrong with this per se, but I think you can aim much higher:

CAP_NET_ADMIN and your CAP_BPF both effectively allow the holder to take over the system, *by design*.  I’m suggesting that you engage the security community (Kees, myself, Aleksa, Jann, Serge, Christian, etc) to aim for something better: make it so that a normal Linux distro would be willing to relax its settings enough so that normal users can use bpf filtering in the systemd units and maybe eventually use even more bpf() capabilities. And let’s make is to that mainstream container managers (that use userns!) will be willing (as an option) to delegate bpf() to their containers. We’re happy to help design, review, and even write code, but we need you to be willing to work with us to make a design that seems like it will work and then to wait long enough to merge it for us to think about it, try to poke holes in it, and convince ourselves and each other that it has a good chance of being sound.

Obviously there will be many cases where an unprivileged program should *not* be able to use bpf() IP filtering, but let’s make it so that enabling these advanced features does not automatically give away the keys to the kingdom.

(Sandstorm still exists but is no longer as actively developed, sadly.)

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