Re: [kernel-hardening] Re: [PATCH 0/2] sysctl: allow CLONE_NEWUSER to be disabled

[Robert ÅwiÄcki]

>> The admin of such a machine could have disabled userns months earlier
>> and limited the scope of the attack.
>
> Of course for the paranoid there is already a mechanism to do this.
> /sbin/chroot.
>
> No new user namespaces are allowed to be created inside of a chroot.

Another alternative is to create a custom kernel module which will
disable the user namespace (by limiting to privileged users only, or
disabling it altogether).

IMO people tend to use distro kernels for convenience, and a
suggestion of creating a chroot dir for every service exposed to
users, or building a custom kernel module is an advice that not many
sysadmins using distro kernels would take, even if they have concerns
about the the increased attack surface enabled by CLONE_NEWUSER.

Also, I don't think the willingness to disable the feature or limit it
to the already privileged users will be something that only truly
paranoid sysadmins/users would have. We've seen a fair amount of
privilege escalation / DoS bugs that this kernel feature enabled in
the recent 18 months or so, and they still seem to be found on a
somewhat regular basis. Therefore this discussion and its outcome
might be of interest to less paranoid folk as well.

I agree with Kees that the "knob" will be mostly used by admins of
web-servers (and similar services) as a protection against privilege
escalation after getting low-priv code execution on the system.
Therefore a sysctl enabled from /etc/sysctl.conf should work well
here, even if it's set to the permissive mode by default at boot.