Re: unprivileged mounts vs. rmdir (was: VFS, NFS security bug? ...)

From: Eric W. Biederman
Date: Fri Mar 27 2009 - 03:04:45 EST


Pavel Machek <pavel@xxxxxx> writes:

> On Mon 2009-03-23 14:21:30, Miklos Szeredi wrote:
>> [CCs trimmed]
>>
>> On Mon, 16 Mar 2009, Serge E. Hallyn wrote:
>> > Quoting J. Bruce Fields (bfields@xxxxxxxxxxxx):
>> > > special privilege, so don't consult filesystem permissions (do I have
>> > > that right? What happened to the attempt to allow ordinary users to
>> > > mount?).
>> >
>> > Well, they keep getting stalled because we don't have a good answer for
>> > what to do about the fact that an unprivileged user can make trees
>> > undeletable by pinning them with mounts. (Miklos and Eric cc'd in case
>> > I didn't explain that well enough).
>>
>> That's correct.
>>
>> The best answer I can come up with is to allow rmdir/unlink to
>> automatically umount trees from their respective dentries. Obviously
>> this can't be done for regular (privileged) mounts, which must keep
>> returning EBUSY in such situations.
>>
>> But for unprivileged mounts I can't see any fundamental issue with
>> such an approach.
>>
>> Does anyone see a problem with this? Is there a better solution?
>
> Well... traditionally if you have an open file or cwd inside mounted
> tree... that blocks unmount, right?
>
> What will you do with processes that have open (deleted) files inside
> the mount? What about cwd?

That is a backwards understanding, of the problem.

Currently I can not delete my mount point if I have something mounted on it in another
mount namespace.

Generally lazy unmounts solve the deleted inodes problem, your were talking about.

Eric


--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/