Quotes of the week

[Posted June 2, 2010 by corbet]

The Linux approach is to do the job right. That means getting the interface right and so it works across all the interested parties (or as close as we can get)... This is the Linux way of doing things. It's like the GPL and being shouted at by Linus. They are things you accept when you choose to take part.

-- Alan Cox

The kernel history is full of examples where crappy solutions got rejected and kept out of the kernel for a long time even if there was a need for them in the application field and they got shipped in quantities with out of tree patches (NOHZ, high resolution timers, ...). At some point people stopped arguing for crappy solutions and sat down and got it right.

-- Thomas Gleixner

The whole "no reason to tolerate broken apps" mindset is simply misguided IMO, because it's based on unrealistic assumptions. That's because in general users only need the platform for running apps they like (or need or whatever). If they can't run apps they like on a given platform, or it is too painful to them to run their apps on it, they will rather switch to another platform than stop using the apps.

-- Rafael Wysocki

NAK NAK NAK NAK! QAK! HAK! Crap code! Stop adding undocumented interfaces. Just stop it. Now. Geeze.

How is anyone supposed to use this? What are the semantics of this thing? What are the units of its return value? What is the base value of its return value? Does it return different times on different CPUs? I assume so, otherwise why does sched_clock_cpu() exist? <looks at the sched_clock_cpu() documentation, collapses in giggles>

-- Andrew Morton after one patch too many

"The more we prohibit, the safer we are" is best left to the likes of TSA; if we are really interested in security and not in security theatre or BDSM fetishism, let's make sure that heuristics we use make sense.

-- Al Viro

to post comments

Can anyone explain why the idea is raised so often when wakelocks are discussed?

Posted Jun 3, 2010 10:18 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't understand why kernel developers so often offer "just use correctly written applications" as argument when wakelocks are discussed? Everywhere else kernel uses different policy: "support broken applications as long as it does not hurt the unbroken ones... much". The fact of the life: 90% applications are crap... and 9% are just plain broken and shouldn't work. The OS saves them where it can so the whole thing works somehow - and that means users will be using said OS. If the OS will only support 1% of "good applications" it'll be dead sooner or later (see Netware: it was much better then Windows, *nix or Linux - if you only used correctly written applications). Why the power management is so different?

Can anyone explain why the idea is raised so often when wakelocks are discussed?

Posted Jun 10, 2010 22:40 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Because power management is critical to using your computer...

If you have a nasty app that won't sleep, your battery is flat in 2 hours when you thought it was going to last all day in idle (do some work on the morning commute, close/suspend your laptop for the day, open it at the start of the commute home only to find it's dead ...).

But the other way round (as I've been bitten, by linpus/Acer One) is that you do a network mv, then the laptop suspends and shuts down the network. Hang on a sec - I've just left my computer to get on with some work, and it shuts down! What's worse, because it was an mv, the shutdown unfortunately broke it with the result that a load of files disappeared in transit :-( !!!

Cheers,
Wol

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 3, 2010 12:27 UTC (Thu) by spender (guest, #23067) [Link] (11 responses)

The wonderfully hilarious main text before Al Viro's quote demonstrating his complete lack of understanding of the vulnerability class:
"I don't buy it. If we are concerned about the symlinks in the middle of
pathname, your checks are useless (mkdir /tmp/a, ln -s whatever /tmp/a/b,
have victim open /tmp/a/b/something). If we are not, then your checks are
in the wrong place."

With thinking like this, I can't wait to see what kinds of "improvements" will be made to the code.

-Brad

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 3, 2010 12:44 UTC (Thu) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link] (10 responses)

There are _many_ symlink-related vulnerability classes; the entire problem is that proposed patch doesn't match any of those.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 3, 2010 14:01 UTC (Thu) by spender (guest, #23067) [Link] (9 responses)

Apparently you missed it: it's about temporary file TOCTOU races.

It's a common mistake for applications to request a temporary file in a $TMPDIR (some world-writable directory with the sticky bit set) without using O_EXCL in the call to open, allowing someone else (if they can predict the pathname to be used) to create a symlink/hardlink using that path to reference a root-owned file they either want to leak (say, /etc/shadow) or change the contents of/corrupt. This should be less common in C apps now that there are more secure functions available for the creation of temporary files, but it remains a problem for scripting languages (think echo "blah" >> $TMPDIR/test).

Your example, of what I have no clue, completely misses this mark. The whole point of this class, and why it's generally a race, is that *you don't choose* the path the application opens. It decides that via whatever temporary pathname generation algorithm it uses (whether it involves some randomness or not). If /tmp/b/a were involved, /tmp/b would have been created by the application. If it wasn't, then there's a separate bug there, as applications using /tmp/b/a paths where /tmp/b isn't a world-writable and sticky directory generally are wanting a private directory to store files -- the directory won't allow the creation of a /tmp/b/a by another user.

From looking at my system, I see the following entries in /tmp: an .ICE-unix directory which is world-writable and sticky, an .X11-unix directory which is world-writable and sticky, and several temporary files from mutt. The feature present in grsecurity and Openwall protect all of these cases.

I'm quite sure this was all explained by Kees Cook and evidenced by all his references, so I don't know how you could have missed it.

So that the feature doesn't match any of the classes is demonstrably false. Is there some secret you've been holding out on that you'd like to enlighten the world with?

Better yet, do you have hundreds of references to real examples of your "attack"?

-Brad

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 3, 2010 15:47 UTC (Thu) by RobSeace (subscriber, #4435) [Link] (1 responses)

> This should be less common in C apps now that there are more secure
> functions available for the creation of temporary files, but it remains a
> problem for scripting languages (think echo "blah" >> $TMPDIR/test).

Shell scripts, at least, have no excuse anymore, either: they can just use /bin/mktemp...

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 3, 2010 17:22 UTC (Thu) by spender (guest, #23067) [Link]

True, they have no excuse, but just judging from recent CVEs and a realistic sense of the context in which scripts are often written (joe sysadmin), there's a higher incidence of them not doing things correctly.

At the end of the day though, I'd just rather not get owned than explain how I got owned because <insert person> had no excuse for the way his code/script was written.

-Brad

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 3, 2010 18:20 UTC (Thu) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link] (6 responses)

Learn to read, please. Both your own description and the patch in question.

1) program that blindly does open()/creat() on directory/something, etc. is certainly in for the world of hurt if directory is writable to somebody else and yes, there's a looong list of exploits based on that.

2) in all these exploits shit hits the fan on the final pathname component.

3) if a program is broken enough to attempt such open()/creat() when it can't even rely on _earlier_ steps in pathname resolution, it's _really_ in trouble; it can be attacked in a lot more ways. Fortunately, that tends to be less frequent.

4) posted patch attempts to apply checks to *ALL* symlink traversals, final or not.

5) for the cases that fall under (2), the patch is an overkill and misplaced; the proper place for these checks is in do_filp_open() loop where we deal with trailing symlink case.

6) for really broken cases (i.e. (3)), it's not going to be anywhere near enough, for all the obvious reasons.

In other words, if that patch claims to deal with attacker-controllable symlinks on *ALL* steps of pathname resolution, the checks are insufficient. If it cares only about the attacker-controllable symlinks on the final step, the checks are misplaced.

Should I spell that in further details or would that suffice?

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 3, 2010 19:26 UTC (Thu) by spender (guest, #23067) [Link] (5 responses)

I'm not the original author of the algorithm (nor is Solar Designer I think -- he credits Andrew Tridgell with it), but I don't believe it was ever meant to cover 3). That it does more checks than it needs to is a minor performance/possible compatibility issue (which hasn't cropped up as an issue in a decade or so).

I didn't see any list of references for 3), you admit it's less frequent -- I'd say much less frequent/scarce.

Tossing around "security theatre" and "BDSM fetishism" as descriptors for the feature is unhelpful, especially when your criticism is only that it makes unnecessary checks and doesn't protect against a severe specific brokenness you can't provide examples of (unlike the case it does protect against, which you agree there's a "looong list of exploits" for).

Might I remind you of mmap_min_addr, which is a workaround for a specific case of a larger class of vulnerabilities? That didn't stop the developers from committing it. And unlike your example, I can point to plenty of OOPs reports showing exploitable uses of poisoned pointers, direct userland access in vgaarb, the vmsplice vuln on amd64, etc, that mmap_min_addr would have been helpless against.

If you can come up with something that covers 3) as well, more power to you, but I don't see how (and don't think you can reasonably justify how) it not covering something it wasn't meant to (that you can't provide even a handful of examples of) means it falls under "security theatre."

If you want to talk about actual security theatre going on in the kernel, we can have a completely different discussion about that.

-Brad

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 3, 2010 23:48 UTC (Thu) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link] (4 responses)

Sigh... Do learn to read, would you? _I_ never advocated trying to save (3) from their stupidity; Eric has and IMNSHO he's delusional. I have seen turds of that variety (in the "look what a power-luser has put in crontab" kind of post-mortems), but said turds had been FUBAR anyway.

The whole point is that checks must make sense. Slapping a heuristic that happens to trigger on what one wants to prohibit as well as on a bunch of other use cases and saying "oh, it prohibits more, so it's better by definition" is *not* a good way to get better security.

It's not a matter of overhead; it's not that large to start with. The real issue here is that you generally want the behaviour of system to make sense and its mental model to be understandable. I.e. the rationale for restrictions should be simple and specific; the more arbitrary they are, the worse.

Again, I have no serious objections against that kind of restrictions. open()/creat() and probably truncate() on the final step of pathname resolution. But it really needs to be done right.

BTW, as for the hardlinks... mount --bind /tmp /tmp is much better mitigation for that; you get an equivalent of /tmp being on a separate fs as far as link()/rename() prevention counts without changing the disk layout, etc. Race-free and with less overhead as well. Can be done at the same time when initscripts mount /proc et.al., transparently for all userland. Any software that breaks because of inability to rename() or link() between /tmp and root filesystem is (a) broken on a lot of boxen already and (b) very suspicious, while we are at it.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 4, 2010 1:50 UTC (Fri) by spender (guest, #23067) [Link] (3 responses)

Well, checking on following symlinks handles the case of /tmp/a where a is a symlink to a root-owned directory (a *.d directory perhaps) and the application blindly writes to /tmp/a/b. That won't be caught by checking only the last path component. Your example was /tmp/a/b/something, which I've never seen personally. /tmp/a is common, /tmp/a/b is rare, but /tmp/a/b/something where a is created by the non-root user seems like an academic exercise to me, so I wouldn't care if it's not protected (we could ask why /tmp/a/b/c/something, /tmp/a/b/c/d/something isn't protected either, but I don't think it's meaningful).

So I still disagree re: security theatre because it doesn't handle /tmp/a/b/something, but I agree that it should be done correctly with a heuristic based on evidence and not just prohibiting more, arbitrarily. Maybe some people on LKML have suggested such things (I'm not subscribed and the interfaces on lkml.org/gmane are horrible for following this stuff) but I don't feel that what's in grsecurity and Openwall for this feature fits that bill.

-Brad

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 4, 2010 2:44 UTC (Fri) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link] (2 responses)

mkdir /tmp/c
ln -s `readlink /tmp/a`/b /tmp/c/b
mv /tmp/a /tmp/d
mv /tmp/c /tmp/a

will be allowed for attacker and result will have application that tries to open /tmp/a/b hitting exactly what it would hit before that sequence, without triggering the checks. Again, I'm *NOT* saying that we need to try saving such applications from themselves; just that patch as posted doesn't in fact protect them. All it really gives is protection for the final component, assuming that everything prior to that walks through secure places. Which it does, in all practically interesting cases.

BTW, "security theatre" was applied to attempts to handwave the patch through, without bothering with the analysis of what it really changed. "It mitigates the ugly holes we want to have covered, and it's surely better to be more thorough". Note that analysis hadn't been given _anywhere_ upthread on l-k ;-/

Anyway, I'm out of that discussion. Flogging the dead horses is boring and this one is a smear on the ground by now...

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 4, 2010 12:28 UTC (Fri) by spender (guest, #23067) [Link] (1 responses)

Indeed that works, I mentioned that it only prevented the case where /tmp/a was a symlink. In your case it's a regular directory. If we assume a blind echo "blah" > /tmp/a/b then indeed the check is bypassed. But /tmp/a/b in the symlinked 'a' case isn't always equivalent to the case where 'a' is a normal directory.

Some simple examples that I don't think are too far-fetched:
If the name of 'b' can't be determined a priori or the directory can't be filled exhaustively with all possible names for 'b', then the symlinked 'a' is required.
A program using /tmp/a/b would have some logic for creating the directory if it doesn't exist and additional logic for when it does exist.
If it does exist, the app could do a number of things, two being:
* check the ownership of the directory (using stat())
* enter the directory and remove all the files inside it
In both of these cases the non-symlinked 'a' doesn't allow for an attack. With the symlinked 'a', the ownership of the directory (assuming we're targeting root) would be root, with the normal directory it'd have ownership of the attacker.
If the application goes in and removes all the files in the directory, in the symlinked 'a' case, it removes files in the directory the attacker is targeting. In the non-symlinked case it simply removes the attacker's symlinks.

I imagine we'll have to agree to disagree on the merits of these differences.

-Brad

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 4, 2010 20:27 UTC (Fri) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

So it gets to be "Let's save programmers form making dumb mistakes by asking them _try_ the dumb mistake blindly and then do it right if the first try fails"... I don't see the logic behind this.

I'm with Al Viro here: The only solution that fixes all troublesome cases and doesn't litter the landscape with all sort of weird special cases is to forbid symlinks completely. That one hurts way too much. The sane solution is just to disallow hard links to outside {/var,}/tmp... i.e., a separate partition (even tmpfs!) or just mount it over itself. Problem gone, no strange special cases, any sane use for the above behavior still works, no kernel changes.