Re: [PATCH] ntsync: Set the permissions to be 0666

[Elizabeth Figura]

On Friday, 14 February 2025 12:45:39 CST Darrick J. Wong wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 14, 2025 at 12:13:03PM -0600, Elizabeth Figura wrote:
> > On Friday, 14 February 2025 07:06:20 CST Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> > > On Fri, Feb 14, 2025 at 12:28:00PM +0000, Mike Lothian wrote:
> > > > This allows ntsync to be usuable by non-root processes out of the box
> > > 
> > > Are you sure you need/want that?  If so, why?  How did existing testing
> > > not ever catch this?
> > 
> > Hi, sorry, this is of course my fault.
> > 
> > We do need /dev/ntsync to be openable from user space for it to be
> > useful. I'm not sure what the most "correct" permissions are to have
> > in this case (when we don't specifically need read or write), but I
> > don't think I see a reason not to just set to 666 or 444.
> > 
> > I originally assumed that the right way to do this was not to set the
> > mode on the kernel file but rather through udev; I believe I was using
> > the code for /dev/loop-control or /dev/fuse as an example, which both
> > do that. So I (and others who tested) had just manually set up udev
> > rules for this, with the eventual intent of adding a default rule to
> > systemd like the others. I only recently realized that doing something
> > like this patch is possible and precedented.
> > 
> > I don't know what the best way to address this is, but this is
> > certainly the simplest.
> 
> Paranoid defaults in the kernel, and then a udev rule to relax the mode
> at runtime.  You could also have logind scripts to add add per-user
> allow acls to the device file at user session set up time... or however
> it is that /dev/sr0 has me on the allow list.  I'm not sure how that
> happens exactly, but it works smoothly.
> 
> I get far less complaining about relaxing posture than tightening it
> (==breaking things) after the fact.

FWIW, it may be worth stressing that this is not a hardware device in any sense, it's a software driver that only lives in a char device (and dedicated module) for the sake of isolating the code. I can't imagine any reason to control access per-user, although my experience may not be enough to grant such imagination.

The only actual risk is a bug in the code itself—which is always possible—but at that point you'd presumably just want to disable it at build time or something similar.