Re: [PATCH] cred: Do not default to init_cred in prepare_kernel_cred()

[Sergey Senozhatsky]

On (22/10/26 16:31), Kees Cook wrote:
> A common exploit pattern for ROP attacks is to abuse prepare_kernel_cred()
> in order to construct escalated privileges[1]. Instead of providing a
> short-hand argument (NULL) to the "daemon" argument to indicate using
> init_cred as the base cred, require that "daemon" is always set to
> an actual task. Replace all existing callers that were passing NULL
> with &init_task.
> 
> Future attacks will need to have sufficiently powerful read/write
> primitives to have found an appropriately privileged task and written it
> to the ROP stack as an argument to succeed, which is similarly difficult
> to the prior effort needed to escalate privileges before struct cred
> existed: locate the current cred and overwrite the uid member.
> 
> This has the added benefit of meaning that prepare_kernel_cred() can no
> longer exceed the privileges of the init task, which may have changed from
> the original init_cred (e.g. dropping capabilities from the bounding set).

Reviewed-by: Sergey Senozhatsky <senozhatsky@xxxxxxxxxxxx>