Re: [GIT] Security subsystem updates for 3.13

From: David Howells
Date: Tue Nov 19 2013 - 09:46:52 EST


James Morris <jmorris@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Mon, 18 Nov 2013, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> ...
> > If somebody wants to explain about the rationale new keys code, that might
> > help.

Okay. There are a number of separate bits. I'll go over the big bits and the
odd important other bit, most of the smaller bits are just fixes and cleanups.
If you want the small bits accounting for, I can do that too.

(1) Keyring capacity expansion.

KEYS: Consolidate the concept of an 'index key' for key access
KEYS: Introduce a search context structure
KEYS: Search for auth-key by name rather than target key ID
Add a generic associative array implementation.
KEYS: Expand the capacity of a keyring

Several of the patches are providing an expansion of the capacity of a
keyring. Currently, the maximum size of a keyring payload is one page.
Subtract a small header and then divide up into pointers, that only gives
you ~500 pointers on an x86_64 box. However, since the NFS idmapper uses
a keyring to store ID mapping data, that has proven to be insufficient to
the cause.

Whatever data structure I use to handle the keyring payload, it can only
store pointers to keys, not the keys themselves because several keyrings
may point to a single key. This precludes inserting, say, and rb_node
struct into the key struct for this purpose.

I could make an rbtree of records such that each record has an rb_node
and a key pointer, but that would use four words of space per key stored
in the keyring. It would, however, be able to use much existing code.

I selected instead a non-rebalancing radix-tree type approach as that
could have a better space-used/key-pointer ratio. I could have used the
radix tree implementation that we already have and insert keys into it by
their serial numbers, but that means any sort of search must iterate over
the whole radix tree. Further, its nodes are a bit on the capacious side
for what I want - especially given that key serial numbers are randomly
allocated, thus leaving a lot of empty space in the tree.

So what I have is an associative array that internally is a radix-tree
with 16 pointers per node where the index key is constructed from the key
type pointer and the key description. This means that an exact lookup by
type+description is very fast as this tells us how to navigate directly to
the target key.

I made the data structure general in lib/assoc_array.c as far as it is
concerned, its index key is just a sequence of bits that leads to a
pointer. It's possible that someone else will be able to make use of it
also. FS-Cache might, for example.


(2) Mark keys as 'trusted' and keyrings as 'trusted only'.

KEYS: verify a certificate is signed by a 'trusted' key
KEYS: Make the system 'trusted' keyring viewable by userspace
KEYS: Add a 'trusted' flag and a 'trusted only' flag
KEYS: Separate the kernel signature checking keyring from module signing

These patches allow keys carrying asymmetric public keys to be marked as
being 'trusted' and allow keyrings to be marked as only permitting the
addition or linkage of trusted keys.

Keys loaded from hardware during kernel boot or compiled into the kernel
during build are marked as being trusted automatically. New keys can be
loaded at runtime with add_key(). They are checked against the system
keyring contents and if their signatures can be validated with keys that
are already marked trusted, then they are marked trusted also and can
thus be added into the master keyring.

Patches from Mimi Zohar make this usable with the IMA keyrings also.


(3) Remove the date checks on the key used to validate a module signature.

X.509: Remove certificate date checks

It's not reasonable to reject a signature just because the key that it was
generated with is no longer valid datewise - especially if the kernel
hasn't yet managed to set the system clock when the first module is
loaded - so just remove those checks.


(4) Make it simpler to deal with additional X.509 being loaded into the kernel.

KEYS: Load *.x509 files into kernel keyring
KEYS: Have make canonicalise the paths of the X.509 certs better to deduplicate

The builder of the kernel now just places files with the extension ".x509"
into the kernel source or build trees and they're concatenated by the
kernel build and stuffed into the appropriate section.


(5) Add support for userspace kerberos to use keyrings.

KEYS: Add per-user_namespace registers for persistent per-UID kerberos caches
KEYS: Implement a big key type that can save to tmpfs

Fedora went to, by default, storing kerberos tickets and tokens in tmpfs.
We looked at storing it in keyrings instead as that confers certain
advantages such as tickets being automatically deleted after a certain
amount of time and the ability for the kernel to get at these tokens more
easily.

To make this work, two things were needed:

(a) A way for the tickets to persist beyond the lifetime of all a user's
sessions so that cron-driven processes can still use them.

The problem is that a user's session keyrings are deleted when the
session that spawned them logs out and the user's user keyring is
deleted when the UID is deleted (typically when the last log out
happens), so neither of these places is suitable.

I've added a system keyring into which a 'persistent' keyring is
created for each UID on request. Each time a user requests their
persistent keyring, the expiry time on it is set anew. If the user
doesn't ask for it for, say, three days, the keyring is automatically
expired and garbage collected using the existing gc. All the kerberos
tokens it held are then also gc'd.

(b) A key type that can hold really big tickets (up to 1MB in size).

The problem is that Active Directory can return huge tickets with lots
of auxiliary data attached. We don't, however, want to eat up huge
tracts of unswappable kernel space for this, so if the ticket is
greater than a certain size, we create a swappable shmem file and dump
the contents in there and just live with the fact we then have an
inode and a dentry overhead. If the ticket is smaller than that, we
slap it in a kmalloc()'d buffer.

David
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