User namespaces + overlayfs = root privileges
User namespaces + overlayfs = root privileges
The user namespaces feature is conceptually fairly straightforward—allow users to run as root in their own space, while limiting their privileges on the system outside that space—but the implementation has, perhaps unsurprisingly, proven to be quite tricky. There are some assumptions about user IDs and how they operate that are deeply wired into the kernel in various subsystems; shaking those out has taken some time, which led to some hesitation about enabling the feature in distribution kernels. But that reluctance has largely passed at this point, which makes the recent discovery of a root-privilege escalation using user namespaces and the overlay filesystem (overlayfs) that much more dangerous.
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