Re: [AppArmor 39/45] AppArmor: Profile loading and manipulation,pathname matching

[Greg KH]

On Fri, Jun 15, 2007 at 04:30:44PM -0700, Crispin Cowan wrote:
> Greg KH wrote:
> > On Fri, Jun 15, 2007 at 10:06:23PM +0200, Pavel Machek wrote:
> >   
> >>>>     * Renamed Directory trees: The above problem is compounded with
> >>>>       directory trees. Changing the name at the top of a large, bushy
> >>>>       tree can require instant relabeling of millions of files.
> >>>>         
> >>> Same daemon can do this.  And yes, it might take a ammount of time, but
> >>> the times that this happens in "real-life" on a "production" server is
> >>> quite small, if at all.
> >>>       
> >> And now, if you move a tree, there will be old labels for a while. But
> >> this does not matter, because attacker could be keeping file
> >> descriptors.
> >>     
> > Agreed.
> >   
> We have built a label-based AA prototype. It fails because there is no
> reasonable way to address the tree renaming problem.

How does inotify not work here?  You are notified that the tree is
moved, your daemon goes through and relabels things as needed.  In the
meantime, before the re-label happens, you might have the wrong label on
things, but "somehow" SELinux already handles this, so I think you
should be fine.

> >> Only case where attacker _can't_ be keeping file descriptors is newly
> >> created files in recently moved tree. But as you already create files
> >> with restrictive permissions, that's okay.
> >>
> >> Yes, you may get some -EPERM during the tree move, but AA has that
> >> problem already, see that "when madly moving trees we sometimes
> >> construct path file never ever had".
> >>     
> > Exactly.
> >   
> You are remembering old behavior. The current AppArmor generates only
> correct and consistent paths. If a process has an open file descriptor
> to such a file, they will retain access to it, as we described here:
> http://forgeftp.novell.com//apparmor/LKML_Submission-May_07/techdoc.pdf
> 
> Under the restorecon-alike proposal, you have a HUGE open race. This
> post http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=1981 describes restorecon
> running for 30 minutes relabeling a file system. That is so far from
> acceptable that it is silly.

Ok, so we fix it.  Seriously, it shouldn't be that hard.  If that's the
only problem we have here, it isn't an issue.

> Of course, this depends on the system in question, but restorecon will
> necessarily need to traverse whatever portions of the filesystem that
> have changed, which can be quite a long time indeed. Any race condition
> measured in minutes is a very serious issue.

Agreed, so we fix that.  There are ways to speed those kinds of things
up quite a bit, and I imagine since the default SELinux behavior doesn't
use restorecon in this kind of use-case, no one has spent the time to do
the work.

> > I can't think of a "real world" use of moving directory trees around
> > that this would come up in as a problem.
> Consider this case: We've been developing a new web site for a month,
> and testing it on the server by putting it in a different virtual
> domain. We want to go live at some particular instant by doing an mv of
> the content into our public HTML directory. We simultaneously want to
> take the old web site down and archive it by moving it somewhere else.
> 
> Under the restorecon proposal, the web site would be horribly broken
> until restorecon finishes, as various random pages are or are not
> accessible to Apache.

Usually you don't do that by doing a 'mv' otherwise you are almost
guaranteed stale and mixed up content for some period of time, not to
mention the issues surrounding paths that might be messed up.

> In a smaller scale example, I want to share some files with a friend. I
> can't be bothered to set up a proper access control system, so I just mv
> the files to ~crispin/public_html/lookitme and in IRC say "get it now,
> going away in 10 minutes" and then move it out again. Yes, you can
> manually address this by running "restorecon ~crispin/public_html". But
> AA does this automatically without having to run any commands.

I'm saying that the daemon will automatically do it for you, you don't
have to do anything on your own.

> You could get restorecon to do this automatically by using inotify.

Yes.

> But to make it as general and transparent as AA is now, you would have
> to run inotify on every directory in the system, with consequences for
> kernel memory and performance.

What "kernel memory and performance" issues are there?  Your SLED
machine already has inotify running on every directory in the system
today, and you don't seem to have noticed that :)

> This problem does not exist for SELinux, because SELinux does not expect
> access to change based on file names.

Agreed.

> This problem does not exist in the proposed AA implementation, because
> the patch makes the access decision based on the current name of the
> file, so it doesn't have a consistency problem between the file and its
> label; there is no label.

No, that's not the issue here.  The issue is if we can use the model
that AA is exporting to users and apply it to the model that the kernel
uses internally to access internal data structures.

> The problem is induced by trying to emulate AA on top of SELinux. They
> don't fit well together. AA fits much better with LSM, which is the
> reason LSM exists.

Not really, LSM is there because originally people thought that a
general-purpose "hook" layer would be useful for implementing different
security models.  But for those types of models that do not map well to
internal kernel structures, perhaps they should be modeled on top of a
security system that does handle the internal kernel representation of
things in the way the kernel works.

> >   Maybe a source code control
> > system might have this issue for the server, but in a second or two
> > everything would be working again as the new files would be relabled
> > correctly.
> >   
> Try an hour or two for a large source code repository. Its linear in the
> number of files, and several hundred thousand files would take a while
> to relabel. A large GIT tree would be particularly painful because of
> the very large number of files.

No, git servers are only storing the sha files, not the "live" tree.
Well, if you want to waste space on your server you might have a copy of
the current tree, but that's a configuration problem on your system.

> > Can anyone else see a problem with this that I'm just being foolish and
> > missing?
> >   
> It is not foolish. The label idea is so attractive that last September
> from discussions with Arjan we actually thought it was the preferred
> implementation. However, what we've been saying over and over again is
> that we *tried* this, and it *doesn't* work at the implementation level.
> There is no good answer, restorecon is an ugly kludge, and so this
> seductive approach turns out to be a dead end.

Great, have any code I can look at?  It would be nice to start with an
already working implementation that is only slow instead of trying to
start from scratch.

> Then there's all the other problems, such as file systems that don't
> support extended attributes, particularly NFS3. Yes, NFS3 is vulnerable
> to network attack, but that is not the threat AA is addressing. AA is
> preventing an application with access to an NFS mount from accessing the
> *entire* mount. There is lots of practical security value in this, and
> label schemes cannot do it. Well, mostly; you could do it with a dynamic
> labeling scheme that labels files as they are pulled into kernel memory,
> but that requires an AA-style regexp parser in the kernel to apply the
> labels.

You still haven't answered Stephen's response to NFSv3, so until then,
please don't trot out this horse.

thanks,

greg k-h
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