Re: [PATCH] security: selinux: allow per-file labeling for bpffs

From: Stephen Smalley
Date: Thu Feb 06 2020 - 13:12:11 EST


On 2/6/20 12:41 PM, Steven Moreland wrote:
On Thu, Feb 6, 2020 at 9:35 AM Stephen Smalley <sds@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 2/6/20 12:21 PM, Stephen Smalley wrote:
On 2/6/20 11:55 AM, Steven Moreland wrote:
From: Connor O'Brien <connoro@xxxxxxxxxx>

Add support for genfscon per-file labeling of bpffs files. This allows
for separate permissions for different pinned bpf objects, which may
be completely unrelated to each other.

Do you want bpf fs to also support userspace labeling of files via
setxattr()? If so, you'll want to also add it to
selinux_is_genfs_special_handling() as well.


Android doesn't currently have this use case.

The only caveat I would note here is that it appears that bpf fs
supports rename, link, unlink, rmdir etc by userspace, which means that
name-based labeling via genfscon isn't necessarily safe/stable. See
https://github.com/SELinuxProject/selinux-kernel/issues/2


Android restricts ownership of these files to a single process (bpfloader) and
so this isn't a concern in our architecture. Is it a concern in general?

I guess if the inodes are pinned in memory, then only the original name under which the file is created will be relevant to determining the label and subsequent rename/link operations won't have any effect. So as long as the bpfloader creates the files with the same names being specified in policy, that should line up and be stable for the lifecycle of the inode.

The alternative model is to have bpfloader look up a context from the userspace file_contexts configuration via selabel_lookup(3) and friends, and set it on the file explicitly. That's what e.g. ueventd does for device nodes. However, one difference here is that you could currently only do this via setxattr()/setfilecon() after creating the file so that the file would temporarily exist in the default label for bpf fs, if that matters. ueventd can instead use setfscreatecon(3) before creating the file so that it is originally created in the right label but that requires the filesystem to call security_inode_init_security() from its function that originally creates the inode, which tmpfs/devtmpfs does but bpf does not. So you'd have to add that to the bpf filesystem code if you wanted to support setfscreatecon(3) on it.