Re: [PATCH] Fix race condition when exec'ing setuid files

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Thu, Oct 06, 2022 at 01:20:35PM -0700, Kees Cook wrote:
> 
> So the question, then, is "why are they trying to exec while actively
> spawning new threads?" That appears to be the core problem here, and as
> far as I can tell, the kernel has behaved this way for a very long time.
> I don't think the kernel should fix this, either, because it leads to a
> very weird state for userspace, where the thread spawner may suddenly
> die due to the exec happening in another thread. This really looks like
> something userspace needs to handle correctly (i.e. don't try to exec
> while actively spawning threads).

One of the classic failure modes is when a threaded program calls a
library, and that library might try to do a fork/exec (or call
system(3) to run some command.  e.g., such as running "lvm create ..."
or to spawn some kind of helper daemon.

There are a number of stack overflow questions about this, and there
are some solutions to _some_ of the problems, such as using
pthread_atfork(), and knowing that you are about to call fork/exec,
and use some out of band mechanism to to make sure no threads get
spawned until the fork/exec is completed --- but if you don't know
that a library is going to do a fork/exec, well, life is tough. 

One technique even advocated by a stack overflow article is "avoid
using threads whenver possible".  :-/

	       	       	  	   - Ted