<feed xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom'>
<title>user/sven/linux.git/fs/proc/array.c, branch v4.9.57</title>
<subtitle>Linux Kernel
</subtitle>
<id>https://git.stealer.net/cgit.cgi/user/sven/linux.git/atom?h=v4.9.57</id>
<link rel='self' href='https://git.stealer.net/cgit.cgi/user/sven/linux.git/atom?h=v4.9.57'/>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.stealer.net/cgit.cgi/user/sven/linux.git/'/>
<updated>2017-10-05T07:43:58Z</updated>
<entry>
<title>fs/proc: Report eip/esp in /prod/PID/stat for coredumping</title>
<updated>2017-10-05T07:43:58Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Ogness</name>
<email>john.ogness@linutronix.de</email>
</author>
<published>2017-09-14T09:42:17Z</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.stealer.net/cgit.cgi/user/sven/linux.git/commit/?id=9ad15a25669ec8c120e910cf18620af2455cb6df'/>
<id>urn:sha1:9ad15a25669ec8c120e910cf18620af2455cb6df</id>
<content type='text'>
commit fd7d56270b526ca3ed0c224362e3c64a0f86687a upstream.

Commit 0a1eb2d474ed ("fs/proc: Stop reporting eip and esp in
/proc/PID/stat") stopped reporting eip/esp because it is
racy and dangerous for executing tasks. The comment adds:

    As far as I know, there are no use programs that make any
    material use of these fields, so just get rid of them.

However, existing userspace core-dump-handler applications (for
example, minicoredumper) are using these fields since they
provide an excellent cross-platform interface to these valuable
pointers. So that commit introduced a user space visible
regression.

Partially revert the change and make the readout possible for
tasks with the proper permissions and only if the target task
has the PF_DUMPCORE flag set.

Fixes: 0a1eb2d474ed ("fs/proc: Stop reporting eip and esp in&gt; /proc/PID/stat")
Reported-by: Marco Felsch &lt;marco.felsch@preh.de&gt;
Signed-off-by: John Ogness &lt;john.ogness@linutronix.de&gt;
Reviewed-by: Andy Lutomirski &lt;luto@kernel.org&gt;
Cc: Tycho Andersen &lt;tycho.andersen@canonical.com&gt;
Cc: Kees Cook &lt;keescook@chromium.org&gt;
Cc: Peter Zijlstra &lt;peterz@infradead.org&gt;
Cc: Brian Gerst &lt;brgerst@gmail.com&gt;
Cc: Tetsuo Handa &lt;penguin-kernel@i-love.sakura.ne.jp&gt;
Cc: Borislav Petkov &lt;bp@alien8.de&gt;
Cc: Al Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
Cc: Linux API &lt;linux-api@vger.kernel.org&gt;
Cc: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Cc: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/87poatfwg6.fsf@linutronix.de
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner &lt;tglx@linutronix.de&gt;
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman &lt;gregkh@linuxfoundation.org&gt;

</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>fs/proc: Stop reporting eip and esp in /proc/PID/stat</title>
<updated>2016-10-20T07:21:41Z</updated>
<author>
<name>Andy Lutomirski</name>
<email>luto@kernel.org</email>
</author>
<published>2016-09-30T17:58:56Z</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.stealer.net/cgit.cgi/user/sven/linux.git/commit/?id=0a1eb2d474edfe75466be6b4677ad84e5e8ca3f5'/>
<id>urn:sha1:0a1eb2d474edfe75466be6b4677ad84e5e8ca3f5</id>
<content type='text'>
Reporting these fields on a non-current task is dangerous.  If the
task is in any state other than normal kernel code, they may contain
garbage or even kernel addresses on some architectures.  (x86_64
used to do this.  I bet lots of architectures still do.)  With
CONFIG_THREAD_INFO_IN_TASK=y, it can OOPS, too.

As far as I know, there are no use programs that make any material
use of these fields, so just get rid of them.

Reported-by: Jann Horn &lt;jann@thejh.net&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andy Lutomirski &lt;luto@kernel.org&gt;
Acked-by: Thomas Gleixner &lt;tglx@linutronix.de&gt;
Cc: Al Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
Cc: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Cc: Borislav Petkov &lt;bp@alien8.de&gt;
Cc: Brian Gerst &lt;brgerst@gmail.com&gt;
Cc: Kees Cook &lt;keescook@chromium.org&gt;
Cc: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Cc: Linux API &lt;linux-api@vger.kernel.org&gt;
Cc: Peter Zijlstra &lt;peterz@infradead.org&gt;
Cc: Tetsuo Handa &lt;penguin-kernel@i-love.sakura.ne.jp&gt;
Cc: Tycho Andersen &lt;tycho.andersen@canonical.com&gt;
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/a5fed4c3f4e33ed25d4bb03567e329bc5a712bcc.1475257877.git.luto@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar &lt;mingo@kernel.org&gt;
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>cred: simpler, 1D supplementary groups</title>
<updated>2016-10-08T01:46:30Z</updated>
<author>
<name>Alexey Dobriyan</name>
<email>adobriyan@gmail.com</email>
</author>
<published>2016-10-08T00:03:12Z</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.stealer.net/cgit.cgi/user/sven/linux.git/commit/?id=81243eacfa400f5f7b89f4c2323d0de9982bb0fb'/>
<id>urn:sha1:81243eacfa400f5f7b89f4c2323d0de9982bb0fb</id>
<content type='text'>
Current supplementary groups code can massively overallocate memory and
is implemented in a way so that access to individual gid is done via 2D
array.

If number of gids is &lt;= 32, memory allocation is more or less tolerable
(140/148 bytes).  But if it is not, code allocates full page (!)
regardless and, what's even more fun, doesn't reuse small 32-entry
array.

2D array means dependent shifts, loads and LEAs without possibility to
optimize them (gid is never known at compile time).

All of the above is unnecessary.  Switch to the usual
trailing-zero-len-array scheme.  Memory is allocated with
kmalloc/vmalloc() and only as much as needed.  Accesses become simpler
(LEA 8(gi,idx,4) or even without displacement).

Maximum number of gids is 65536 which translates to 256KB+8 bytes.  I
think kernel can handle such allocation.

On my usual desktop system with whole 9 (nine) aux groups, struct
group_info shrinks from 148 bytes to 44 bytes, yay!

Nice side effects:

 - "gi-&gt;gid[i]" is shorter than "GROUP_AT(gi, i)", less typing,

 - fix little mess in net/ipv4/ping.c
   should have been using GROUP_AT macro but this point becomes moot,

 - aux group allocation is persistent and should be accounted as such.

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20160817201927.GA2096@p183.telecom.by
Signed-off-by: Alexey Dobriyan &lt;adobriyan@gmail.com&gt;
Cc: Vasily Kulikov &lt;segoon@openwall.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>seq/proc: modify seq_put_decimal_[u]ll to take a const char *, not char</title>
<updated>2016-10-08T01:46:30Z</updated>
<author>
<name>Joe Perches</name>
<email>joe@perches.com</email>
</author>
<published>2016-10-08T00:02:20Z</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.stealer.net/cgit.cgi/user/sven/linux.git/commit/?id=75ba1d07fd6a494851db5132612944a9d4773f9c'/>
<id>urn:sha1:75ba1d07fd6a494851db5132612944a9d4773f9c</id>
<content type='text'>
Allow some seq_puts removals by taking a string instead of a single
char.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: update vmstat_show(), per Joe]
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/667e1cf3d436de91a5698170a1e98d882905e956.1470704995.git.joe@perches.com
Signed-off-by: Joe Perches &lt;joe@perches.com&gt;
Cc: Joe Perches &lt;joe@perches.com&gt;
Cc: Andi Kleen &lt;andi@firstfloor.org&gt;
Cc: Al Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>proc: faster /proc/*/status</title>
<updated>2016-10-08T01:46:30Z</updated>
<author>
<name>Alexey Dobriyan</name>
<email>adobriyan@gmail.com</email>
</author>
<published>2016-10-08T00:02:17Z</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.stealer.net/cgit.cgi/user/sven/linux.git/commit/?id=f7a5f132b447cb6301ab3f0b0468a63db29e41f5'/>
<id>urn:sha1:f7a5f132b447cb6301ab3f0b0468a63db29e41f5</id>
<content type='text'>
top(1) opens the following files for every PID:

	/proc/*/stat
	/proc/*/statm
	/proc/*/status

This patch switches /proc/*/status away from seq_printf().
The result is 13.5% speedup.

Benchmark is open("/proc/self/status")+read+close 1.000.000 million times.

				BEFORE
$ perf stat -r 10 taskset -c 3 ./proc-self-status

 Performance counter stats for 'taskset -c 3 ./proc-self-status' (10 runs):

      10748.474301      task-clock (msec)         #    0.954 CPUs utilized            ( +-  0.91% )
                12      context-switches          #    0.001 K/sec                    ( +-  1.09% )
                 1      cpu-migrations            #    0.000 K/sec
               104      page-faults               #    0.010 K/sec                    ( +-  0.45% )
    37,424,127,876      cycles                    #    3.482 GHz                      ( +-  0.04% )
     8,453,010,029      stalled-cycles-frontend   #   22.59% frontend cycles idle     ( +-  0.12% )
     3,747,609,427      stalled-cycles-backend    #  10.01% backend cycles idle       ( +-  0.68% )
    65,632,764,147      instructions              #    1.75  insn per cycle
                                                  #    0.13  stalled cycles per insn  ( +-  0.00% )
    13,981,324,775      branches                  # 1300.773 M/sec                    ( +-  0.00% )
       138,967,110      branch-misses             #    0.99% of all branches          ( +-  0.18% )

      11.263885428 seconds time elapsed                                          ( +-  0.04% )
      ^^^^^^^^^^^^

				AFTER
$ perf stat -r 10 taskset -c 3 ./proc-self-status

 Performance counter stats for 'taskset -c 3 ./proc-self-status' (10 runs):

       9010.521776      task-clock (msec)         #    0.925 CPUs utilized            ( +-  1.54% )
                11      context-switches          #    0.001 K/sec                    ( +-  1.54% )
                 1      cpu-migrations            #    0.000 K/sec                    ( +- 11.11% )
               103      page-faults               #    0.011 K/sec                    ( +-  0.60% )
    32,352,310,603      cycles                    #    3.591 GHz                      ( +-  0.07% )
     7,849,199,578      stalled-cycles-frontend   #   24.26% frontend cycles idle     ( +-  0.27% )
     3,269,738,842      stalled-cycles-backend    #  10.11% backend cycles idle       ( +-  0.73% )
    56,012,163,567      instructions              #    1.73  insn per cycle
                                                  #    0.14  stalled cycles per insn  ( +-  0.00% )
    11,735,778,795      branches                  # 1302.453 M/sec                    ( +-  0.00% )
        98,084,459      branch-misses             #    0.84% of all branches          ( +-  0.28% )

       9.741247736 seconds time elapsed                                          ( +-  0.07% )
       ^^^^^^^^^^^

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20160806125608.GB1187@p183.telecom.by
Signed-off-by: Alexey Dobriyan &lt;adobriyan@gmail.com&gt;
Cc: Joe Perches &lt;joe@perches.com&gt;
Cc: Andi Kleen &lt;andi@firstfloor.org&gt;
Cc: Al Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>procfs: expose umask in /proc/&lt;PID&gt;/status</title>
<updated>2016-05-21T00:58:30Z</updated>
<author>
<name>Richard W.M. Jones</name>
<email>rjones@redhat.com</email>
</author>
<published>2016-05-21T00:00:05Z</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.stealer.net/cgit.cgi/user/sven/linux.git/commit/?id=3e42979e65dace1f9268dd5440e5ab096b8dee59'/>
<id>urn:sha1:3e42979e65dace1f9268dd5440e5ab096b8dee59</id>
<content type='text'>
It's not possible to read the process umask without also modifying it,
which is what umask(2) does.  A library cannot read umask safely,
especially if the main program might be multithreaded.

Add a new status line ("Umask") in /proc/&lt;PID&gt;/status.  It contains the
file mode creation mask (umask) in octal.  It is only shown for tasks
which have task-&gt;fs.

This patch is adapted from one originally written by Pierre Carrier.

The use case is that we have endless trouble with people setting weird
umask() values (usually on the grounds of "security"), and then
everything breaking.  I'm on the hook to fix these.  We'd like to add
debugging to our program so we can dump out the umask in debug reports.

Previous versions of the patch used a syscall so you could only read
your own umask.  That's all I need.  However there was quite a lot of
push-back from those, so this new version exports it in /proc.

See:
  https://lkml.org/lkml/2016/4/13/704 [umask2]
  https://lkml.org/lkml/2016/4/13/487 [getumask]

Signed-off-by: Richard W.M. Jones &lt;rjones@redhat.com&gt;
Acked-by: Konstantin Khlebnikov &lt;koct9i@gmail.com&gt;
Acked-by: Jerome Marchand &lt;jmarchan@redhat.com&gt;
Acked-by: Kees Cook &lt;keescook@chromium.org&gt;
Cc: "Theodore Ts'o" &lt;tytso@mit.edu&gt;
Cc: Michal Hocko &lt;mhocko@kernel.org&gt;
Cc: Pierre Carrier &lt;pierre@spotify.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>ptrace: use fsuid, fsgid, effective creds for fs access checks</title>
<updated>2016-01-21T01:09:18Z</updated>
<author>
<name>Jann Horn</name>
<email>jann@thejh.net</email>
</author>
<published>2016-01-20T23:00:04Z</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.stealer.net/cgit.cgi/user/sven/linux.git/commit/?id=caaee6234d05a58c5b4d05e7bf766131b810a657'/>
<id>urn:sha1:caaee6234d05a58c5b4d05e7bf766131b810a657</id>
<content type='text'>
By checking the effective credentials instead of the real UID / permitted
capabilities, ensure that the calling process actually intended to use its
credentials.

To ensure that all ptrace checks use the correct caller credentials (e.g.
in case out-of-tree code or newly added code omits the PTRACE_MODE_*CREDS
flag), use two new flags and require one of them to be set.

The problem was that when a privileged task had temporarily dropped its
privileges, e.g.  by calling setreuid(0, user_uid), with the intent to
perform following syscalls with the credentials of a user, it still passed
ptrace access checks that the user would not be able to pass.

While an attacker should not be able to convince the privileged task to
perform a ptrace() syscall, this is a problem because the ptrace access
check is reused for things in procfs.

In particular, the following somewhat interesting procfs entries only rely
on ptrace access checks:

 /proc/$pid/stat - uses the check for determining whether pointers
     should be visible, useful for bypassing ASLR
 /proc/$pid/maps - also useful for bypassing ASLR
 /proc/$pid/cwd - useful for gaining access to restricted
     directories that contain files with lax permissions, e.g. in
     this scenario:
     lrwxrwxrwx root root /proc/13020/cwd -&gt; /root/foobar
     drwx------ root root /root
     drwxr-xr-x root root /root/foobar
     -rw-r--r-- root root /root/foobar/secret

Therefore, on a system where a root-owned mode 6755 binary changes its
effective credentials as described and then dumps a user-specified file,
this could be used by an attacker to reveal the memory layout of root's
processes or reveal the contents of files he is not allowed to access
(through /proc/$pid/cwd).

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix warning]
Signed-off-by: Jann Horn &lt;jann@thejh.net&gt;
Acked-by: Kees Cook &lt;keescook@chromium.org&gt;
Cc: Casey Schaufler &lt;casey@schaufler-ca.com&gt;
Cc: Oleg Nesterov &lt;oleg@redhat.com&gt;
Cc: Ingo Molnar &lt;mingo@redhat.com&gt;
Cc: James Morris &lt;james.l.morris@oracle.com&gt;
Cc: "Serge E. Hallyn" &lt;serge.hallyn@ubuntu.com&gt;
Cc: Andy Shevchenko &lt;andriy.shevchenko@linux.intel.com&gt;
Cc: Andy Lutomirski &lt;luto@kernel.org&gt;
Cc: Al Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" &lt;ebiederm@xmission.com&gt;
Cc: Willy Tarreau &lt;w@1wt.eu&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>fs/proc/array.c: set overflow flag in case of error</title>
<updated>2015-11-07T01:50:42Z</updated>
<author>
<name>Andy Shevchenko</name>
<email>andriy.shevchenko@linux.intel.com</email>
</author>
<published>2015-11-07T00:30:03Z</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.stealer.net/cgit.cgi/user/sven/linux.git/commit/?id=3a49f3d2a10dfb27411d321900197a3d6c52405b'/>
<id>urn:sha1:3a49f3d2a10dfb27411d321900197a3d6c52405b</id>
<content type='text'>
For now in task_name() we ignore the return code of string_escape_str()
call.  This is not good if buffer suddenly becomes not big enough.  Do the
proper error handling there.

Signed-off-by: Andy Shevchenko &lt;andriy.shevchenko@linux.intel.com&gt;
Cc: Alexander Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>fs/proc, core/debug: Don't expose absolute kernel addresses via wchan</title>
<updated>2015-10-01T10:55:34Z</updated>
<author>
<name>Ingo Molnar</name>
<email>mingo@kernel.org</email>
</author>
<published>2015-09-30T13:59:17Z</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.stealer.net/cgit.cgi/user/sven/linux.git/commit/?id=b2f73922d119686323f14fbbe46587f863852328'/>
<id>urn:sha1:b2f73922d119686323f14fbbe46587f863852328</id>
<content type='text'>
So the /proc/PID/stat 'wchan' field (the 30th field, which contains
the absolute kernel address of the kernel function a task is blocked in)
leaks absolute kernel addresses to unprivileged user-space:

        seq_put_decimal_ull(m, ' ', wchan);

The absolute address might also leak via /proc/PID/wchan as well, if
KALLSYMS is turned off or if the symbol lookup fails for some reason:

static int proc_pid_wchan(struct seq_file *m, struct pid_namespace *ns,
                          struct pid *pid, struct task_struct *task)
{
        unsigned long wchan;
        char symname[KSYM_NAME_LEN];

        wchan = get_wchan(task);

        if (lookup_symbol_name(wchan, symname) &lt; 0) {
                if (!ptrace_may_access(task, PTRACE_MODE_READ))
                        return 0;
                seq_printf(m, "%lu", wchan);
        } else {
                seq_printf(m, "%s", symname);
        }

        return 0;
}

This isn't ideal, because for example it trivially leaks the KASLR offset
to any local attacker:

  fomalhaut:~&gt; printf "%016lx\n" $(cat /proc/$$/stat | cut -d' ' -f35)
  ffffffff8123b380

Most real-life uses of wchan are symbolic:

  ps -eo pid:10,tid:10,wchan:30,comm

and procps uses /proc/PID/wchan, not the absolute address in /proc/PID/stat:

  triton:~/tip&gt; strace -f ps -eo pid:10,tid:10,wchan:30,comm 2&gt;&amp;1 | grep wchan | tail -1
  open("/proc/30833/wchan", O_RDONLY)     = 6

There's one compatibility quirk here: procps relies on whether the
absolute value is non-zero - and we can provide that functionality
by outputing "0" or "1" depending on whether the task is blocked
(whether there's a wchan address).

These days there appears to be very little legitimate reason
user-space would be interested in  the absolute address. The
absolute address is mostly historic: from the days when we
didn't have kallsyms and user-space procps had to do the
decoding itself via the System.map.

So this patch sets all numeric output to "0" or "1" and keeps only
symbolic output, in /proc/PID/wchan.

( The absolute sleep address can generally still be profiled via
  perf, by tasks with sufficient privileges. )

Reviewed-by: Thomas Gleixner &lt;tglx@linutronix.de&gt;
Acked-by: Kees Cook &lt;keescook@chromium.org&gt;
Acked-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Cc: &lt;stable@vger.kernel.org&gt;
Cc: Al Viro &lt;viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk&gt;
Cc: Alexander Potapenko &lt;glider@google.com&gt;
Cc: Andrey Konovalov &lt;andreyknvl@google.com&gt;
Cc: Andrey Ryabinin &lt;ryabinin.a.a@gmail.com&gt;
Cc: Andy Lutomirski &lt;luto@amacapital.net&gt;
Cc: Andy Lutomirski &lt;luto@kernel.org&gt;
Cc: Borislav Petkov &lt;bp@alien8.de&gt;
Cc: Denys Vlasenko &lt;dvlasenk@redhat.com&gt;
Cc: Dmitry Vyukov &lt;dvyukov@google.com&gt;
Cc: Kostya Serebryany &lt;kcc@google.com&gt;
Cc: Mike Galbraith &lt;efault@gmx.de&gt;
Cc: Peter Zijlstra &lt;a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl&gt;
Cc: Peter Zijlstra &lt;peterz@infradead.org&gt;
Cc: Sasha Levin &lt;sasha.levin@oracle.com&gt;
Cc: kasan-dev &lt;kasan-dev@googlegroups.com&gt;
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20150930135917.GA3285@gmail.com
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar &lt;mingo@kernel.org&gt;
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>capabilities: ambient capabilities</title>
<updated>2015-09-04T23:54:41Z</updated>
<author>
<name>Andy Lutomirski</name>
<email>luto@kernel.org</email>
</author>
<published>2015-09-04T22:42:45Z</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.stealer.net/cgit.cgi/user/sven/linux.git/commit/?id=58319057b7847667f0c9585b9de0e8932b0fdb08'/>
<id>urn:sha1:58319057b7847667f0c9585b9de0e8932b0fdb08</id>
<content type='text'>
Credit where credit is due: this idea comes from Christoph Lameter with
a lot of valuable input from Serge Hallyn.  This patch is heavily based
on Christoph's patch.

===== The status quo =====

On Linux, there are a number of capabilities defined by the kernel.  To
perform various privileged tasks, processes can wield capabilities that
they hold.

Each task has four capability masks: effective (pE), permitted (pP),
inheritable (pI), and a bounding set (X).  When the kernel checks for a
capability, it checks pE.  The other capability masks serve to modify
what capabilities can be in pE.

Any task can remove capabilities from pE, pP, or pI at any time.  If a
task has a capability in pP, it can add that capability to pE and/or pI.
If a task has CAP_SETPCAP, then it can add any capability to pI, and it
can remove capabilities from X.

Tasks are not the only things that can have capabilities; files can also
have capabilities.  A file can have no capabilty information at all [1].
If a file has capability information, then it has a permitted mask (fP)
and an inheritable mask (fI) as well as a single effective bit (fE) [2].
File capabilities modify the capabilities of tasks that execve(2) them.

A task that successfully calls execve has its capabilities modified for
the file ultimately being excecuted (i.e.  the binary itself if that
binary is ELF or for the interpreter if the binary is a script.) [3] In
the capability evolution rules, for each mask Z, pZ represents the old
value and pZ' represents the new value.  The rules are:

  pP' = (X &amp; fP) | (pI &amp; fI)
  pI' = pI
  pE' = (fE ? pP' : 0)
  X is unchanged

For setuid binaries, fP, fI, and fE are modified by a moderately
complicated set of rules that emulate POSIX behavior.  Similarly, if
euid == 0 or ruid == 0, then fP, fI, and fE are modified differently
(primary, fP and fI usually end up being the full set).  For nonroot
users executing binaries with neither setuid nor file caps, fI and fP
are empty and fE is false.

As an extra complication, if you execute a process as nonroot and fE is
set, then the "secure exec" rules are in effect: AT_SECURE gets set,
LD_PRELOAD doesn't work, etc.

This is rather messy.  We've learned that making any changes is
dangerous, though: if a new kernel version allows an unprivileged
program to change its security state in a way that persists cross
execution of a setuid program or a program with file caps, this
persistent state is surprisingly likely to allow setuid or file-capped
programs to be exploited for privilege escalation.

===== The problem =====

Capability inheritance is basically useless.

If you aren't root and you execute an ordinary binary, fI is zero, so
your capabilities have no effect whatsoever on pP'.  This means that you
can't usefully execute a helper process or a shell command with elevated
capabilities if you aren't root.

On current kernels, you can sort of work around this by setting fI to
the full set for most or all non-setuid executable files.  This causes
pP' = pI for nonroot, and inheritance works.  No one does this because
it's a PITA and it isn't even supported on most filesystems.

If you try this, you'll discover that every nonroot program ends up with
secure exec rules, breaking many things.

This is a problem that has bitten many people who have tried to use
capabilities for anything useful.

===== The proposed change =====

This patch adds a fifth capability mask called the ambient mask (pA).
pA does what most people expect pI to do.

pA obeys the invariant that no bit can ever be set in pA if it is not
set in both pP and pI.  Dropping a bit from pP or pI drops that bit from
pA.  This ensures that existing programs that try to drop capabilities
still do so, with a complication.  Because capability inheritance is so
broken, setting KEEPCAPS, using setresuid to switch to nonroot uids, and
then calling execve effectively drops capabilities.  Therefore,
setresuid from root to nonroot conditionally clears pA unless
SECBIT_NO_SETUID_FIXUP is set.  Processes that don't like this can
re-add bits to pA afterwards.

The capability evolution rules are changed:

  pA' = (file caps or setuid or setgid ? 0 : pA)
  pP' = (X &amp; fP) | (pI &amp; fI) | pA'
  pI' = pI
  pE' = (fE ? pP' : pA')
  X is unchanged

If you are nonroot but you have a capability, you can add it to pA.  If
you do so, your children get that capability in pA, pP, and pE.  For
example, you can set pA = CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE, and your children can
automatically bind low-numbered ports.  Hallelujah!

Unprivileged users can create user namespaces, map themselves to a
nonzero uid, and create both privileged (relative to their namespace)
and unprivileged process trees.  This is currently more or less
impossible.  Hallelujah!

You cannot use pA to try to subvert a setuid, setgid, or file-capped
program: if you execute any such program, pA gets cleared and the
resulting evolution rules are unchanged by this patch.

Users with nonzero pA are unlikely to unintentionally leak that
capability.  If they run programs that try to drop privileges, dropping
privileges will still work.

It's worth noting that the degree of paranoia in this patch could
possibly be reduced without causing serious problems.  Specifically, if
we allowed pA to persist across executing non-pA-aware setuid binaries
and across setresuid, then, naively, the only capabilities that could
leak as a result would be the capabilities in pA, and any attacker
*already* has those capabilities.  This would make me nervous, though --
setuid binaries that tried to privilege-separate might fail to do so,
and putting CAP_DAC_READ_SEARCH or CAP_DAC_OVERRIDE into pA could have
unexpected side effects.  (Whether these unexpected side effects would
be exploitable is an open question.) I've therefore taken the more
paranoid route.  We can revisit this later.

An alternative would be to require PR_SET_NO_NEW_PRIVS before setting
ambient capabilities.  I think that this would be annoying and would
make granting otherwise unprivileged users minor ambient capabilities
(CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE or CAP_NET_RAW for example) much less useful than
it is with this patch.

===== Footnotes =====

[1] Files that are missing the "security.capability" xattr or that have
unrecognized values for that xattr end up with has_cap set to false.
The code that does that appears to be complicated for no good reason.

[2] The libcap capability mask parsers and formatters are dangerously
misleading and the documentation is flat-out wrong.  fE is *not* a mask;
it's a single bit.  This has probably confused every single person who
has tried to use file capabilities.

[3] Linux very confusingly processes both the script and the interpreter
if applicable, for reasons that elude me.  The results from thinking
about a script's file capabilities and/or setuid bits are mostly
discarded.

Preliminary userspace code is here, but it needs updating:
https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/luto/util-linux-playground.git/commit/?h=cap_ambient&amp;id=7f5afbd175d2

Here is a test program that can be used to verify the functionality
(from Christoph):

/*
 * Test program for the ambient capabilities. This program spawns a shell
 * that allows running processes with a defined set of capabilities.
 *
 * (C) 2015 Christoph Lameter &lt;cl@linux.com&gt;
 * Released under: GPL v3 or later.
 *
 *
 * Compile using:
 *
 *	gcc -o ambient_test ambient_test.o -lcap-ng
 *
 * This program must have the following capabilities to run properly:
 * Permissions for CAP_NET_RAW, CAP_NET_ADMIN, CAP_SYS_NICE
 *
 * A command to equip the binary with the right caps is:
 *
 *	setcap cap_net_raw,cap_net_admin,cap_sys_nice+p ambient_test
 *
 *
 * To get a shell with additional caps that can be inherited by other processes:
 *
 *	./ambient_test /bin/bash
 *
 *
 * Verifying that it works:
 *
 * From the bash spawed by ambient_test run
 *
 *	cat /proc/$$/status
 *
 * and have a look at the capabilities.
 */

#include &lt;stdlib.h&gt;
#include &lt;stdio.h&gt;
#include &lt;errno.h&gt;
#include &lt;cap-ng.h&gt;
#include &lt;sys/prctl.h&gt;
#include &lt;linux/capability.h&gt;

/*
 * Definitions from the kernel header files. These are going to be removed
 * when the /usr/include files have these defined.
 */
#define PR_CAP_AMBIENT 47
#define PR_CAP_AMBIENT_IS_SET 1
#define PR_CAP_AMBIENT_RAISE 2
#define PR_CAP_AMBIENT_LOWER 3
#define PR_CAP_AMBIENT_CLEAR_ALL 4

static void set_ambient_cap(int cap)
{
	int rc;

	capng_get_caps_process();
	rc = capng_update(CAPNG_ADD, CAPNG_INHERITABLE, cap);
	if (rc) {
		printf("Cannot add inheritable cap\n");
		exit(2);
	}
	capng_apply(CAPNG_SELECT_CAPS);

	/* Note the two 0s at the end. Kernel checks for these */
	if (prctl(PR_CAP_AMBIENT, PR_CAP_AMBIENT_RAISE, cap, 0, 0)) {
		perror("Cannot set cap");
		exit(1);
	}
}

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
	int rc;

	set_ambient_cap(CAP_NET_RAW);
	set_ambient_cap(CAP_NET_ADMIN);
	set_ambient_cap(CAP_SYS_NICE);

	printf("Ambient_test forking shell\n");
	if (execv(argv[1], argv + 1))
		perror("Cannot exec");

	return 0;
}

Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter &lt;cl@linux.com&gt; # Original author
Signed-off-by: Andy Lutomirski &lt;luto@kernel.org&gt;
Acked-by: Serge E. Hallyn &lt;serge.hallyn@ubuntu.com&gt;
Acked-by: Kees Cook &lt;keescook@chromium.org&gt;
Cc: Jonathan Corbet &lt;corbet@lwn.net&gt;
Cc: Aaron Jones &lt;aaronmdjones@gmail.com&gt;
Cc: Ted Ts'o &lt;tytso@mit.edu&gt;
Cc: Andrew G. Morgan &lt;morgan@kernel.org&gt;
Cc: Mimi Zohar &lt;zohar@linux.vnet.ibm.com&gt;
Cc: Austin S Hemmelgarn &lt;ahferroin7@gmail.com&gt;
Cc: Markku Savela &lt;msa@moth.iki.fi&gt;
Cc: Jarkko Sakkinen &lt;jarkko.sakkinen@linux.intel.com&gt;
Cc: Michael Kerrisk &lt;mtk.manpages@gmail.com&gt;
Cc: James Morris &lt;james.l.morris@oracle.com&gt;
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton &lt;akpm@linux-foundation.org&gt;
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds &lt;torvalds@linux-foundation.org&gt;
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