/* Background. */ Container runtimes or other administrative management processes will often interact with root filesystems while in the host mount namespace, because the cost of doing a chroot(2) on every operation is too prohibitive (especially in Go, which cannot safely use vfork). However, a malicious program can trick the management process into doing operations on files outside of the root filesystem through careful crafting of symlinks.
Most programs that need this feature have attempted to make this process safe, by doing all of the path resolution in userspace (with symlinks being scoped to the root of the malicious root filesystem). Unfortunately, this method is prone to foot-guns and usually such implementations have subtle security bugs.
Thus, what userspace needs is a way to resolve a path as though it were in a chroot(2) -- with all absolute symlinks being resolved relative to the dirfd root (and ".." components being stuck under the dirfd root[1]) It is much simpler and more straight-forward to provide this functionality in-kernel (because it can be done far more cheaply and correctly).
More classical applications that also have this problem (which have their own potentially buggy userspace path sanitisation code) include web servers, archive extraction tools, network file servers, and so on.
[1]: At the moment, ".." and magic-link jumping are disallowed for the same reason it is disabled for LOOKUP_BENEATH -- currently it is not safe to allow it. Future patches may enable it unconditionally once we have resolved the possible races (for "..") and semantics (for magic-link jumping).
/* Userspace API. */ LOOKUP_IN_ROOT will be exposed to userspace through openat2(2).
There is a slight change in behaviour regarding pathnames -- if the pathname is absolute then the dirfd is still used as the root of resolution of LOOKUP_IN_ROOT is specified (this is to avoid obvious foot-guns, at the cost of a minor API inconsistency).
Signed-off-by: Aleksa Sarai cyphar@cyphar.com --- fs/namei.c | 5 +++++ include/linux/namei.h | 3 ++- 2 files changed, 7 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
diff --git a/fs/namei.c b/fs/namei.c index 54fdbdfbeb94..9d00b138f54c 100644 --- a/fs/namei.c +++ b/fs/namei.c @@ -2277,6 +2277,11 @@ static const char *path_init(struct nameidata *nd, unsigned flags)
nd->m_seq = read_seqbegin(&mount_lock);
+ /* LOOKUP_IN_ROOT treats absolute paths as being relative-to-dirfd. */ + if (flags & LOOKUP_IN_ROOT) + while (*s == '/') + s++; + /* Figure out the starting path and root (if needed). */ if (*s == '/') { error = nd_jump_root(nd); diff --git a/include/linux/namei.h b/include/linux/namei.h index 35a1bf074ff1..c7a010570d05 100644 --- a/include/linux/namei.h +++ b/include/linux/namei.h @@ -47,8 +47,9 @@ enum {LAST_NORM, LAST_ROOT, LAST_DOT, LAST_DOTDOT, LAST_BIND}; #define LOOKUP_NO_MAGICLINKS 0x080000 /* No /proc/$pid/fd/ "symlink" crossing. */ #define LOOKUP_NO_SYMLINKS 0x100000 /* No symlink crossing *at all*. Implies LOOKUP_NO_MAGICLINKS. */ +#define LOOKUP_IN_ROOT 0x200000 /* Treat dirfd as %current->fs->root. */ /* LOOKUP_* flags which do scope-related checks based on the dirfd. */ -#define LOOKUP_IS_SCOPED LOOKUP_BENEATH +#define LOOKUP_IS_SCOPED (LOOKUP_BENEATH | LOOKUP_IN_ROOT)
extern int path_pts(struct path *path);