Re: Using fs views to isolate untrusted processes: I need an assistantarchitect in the USA for Phase I of a DARPA funded linux kernel project

[Mike Waychison]

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Kyle Moffett wrote:
> On Aug 25, 2004, at 16:56, Tim Hockin wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Aug 25, 2004 at 04:25:24PM -0400, Rik van Riel wrote:
>>
>>>> You can think of this as chroot on steroids.
>>>
>>>
>>> Sounds like what you want is pretty much the namespace stuff
>>> that has been in the kernel since the early 2.4 days.
>>>
>>> No need to replicate VFS functionality inside the filesystem.
>>
>>
>> When I was at Sun, we talked a lot about this.  Mike, does Sun have any
>> iterest in this?
>>
>> We found a lot of shortcomings in implementing various namespace-ish
>> things.
>
>
> Here's a simple way to do what you want in userspace:
> 1) Apply the kernel bind mount options fix (*)
> 2) Run the following shell script
>
> cat <<'EOF' >fsviews.bash
> #! /bin/bash
> # First make the subdirectories
> mkdir /fsviews_orig
> mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /fsviews_rw
> mkdir /fsviews_orig/dir1
> mkdir /fsviews_orig/dir2
> mkdir /fsviews_orig/old
>
> # Now make it read-only with a copy in /fsviews
> mkdir /fsviews
> mount --bind /fsviews_orig /fsviews
>
> # Put directories in /fsviews
> mount --bind /somewhere/dir1 /fsviews/dir1
> mount --bind -o ro /otherplace/dir2 /fsviews/dir2
>
> # Start the process in a new namespace
> clone_prog bash <<'BACK_TO_OLD_NAMESPACE'
>
> mount -o ro,remount /fsviews_orig
> pivot_root /fsviews /fsviews/old
> umount -l /fsviews/old
> /dir1/myscript &
>
> BACK_TO_OLD_NAMESPACE
>
> # Remove the extra dirs in this namespace
> umount -l /fsviews
> umount -l /fsviews_orig
> rmdir /fsviews
> rmdir /fsviews_orig
>
> EOF
>
> This assumes that clone_prog is a short C program that does a clone()
> syscall
> with the CLONE_NEWNS flag and executes a new process.
>
> Once this is done, "/dir2/script" is running in a _completely_ new
> namespace
> with a read-only root directory and two directories from other parts of
> the vfs.
>
> (*) IIRC currently bind-mount rw/ro options are those of the underlying
> mount,
> the bind-mount options fix provides a separate set of options for each
> bound
> copy.  There is only one minimal security implication without said
> patch, that
> root can still 'mount -o rw,remount /' to get root writeable again, but
> since it's
> on tmpfs, that doesn't matter much.  You could also just take away some
> capabilities, but otherwise except for the shared process tables this
> acts very
> much like a completely new, separate computer.  I've used this to
> thoroughly
> secure minimally trusted daemons before. :-D
>
> Cheers,
> Kyle Moffett

This provides minimal protection if any: the user may remount any block
devices on any given tree in his 'namespace' (in the sense of "that is
what we call a mount-table in Linux").  *

If I understand what Hans is looking to get done, he's asking for
someone to architect a system where any given process can be restricted
to seeing/accessing a subset of the namespace (in the sense of "a tree
of directories/files").  Eg: process Foo is allowed access to write to
/etc/group, but _not_ allowed access to /etc/shadow, under any
circumstances && Foo will be run as root.  Hell, maybe Foo is never able
to even _see_ /etc/shadow (making it a true shadow file :).

Hans, correct me if I misunderstood.

[*] Somebody really should s/struct namespace/struct mounttable/g (or
even mounttree) on the kernel sources.  'Namespace' isn't very
descriptive and it leads to confusion :(

- --
Mike Waychison
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
1 (650) 352-5299 voice
1 (416) 202-8336 voice
http://www.sun.com

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NOTICE:  The opinions expressed in this email are held by me,
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