[PATCH] capabilities: introduce per-process capability bounding set (v2)

Serge E. Hallyn serge at hallyn.com
Fri Sep 28 12:45:41 PDT 2007


Quoting Serge E. Hallyn (serue at us.ibm.com):
> Two comments on this patch.
> 
> One issue that is buggine me is when capabilities are not in the
> kernel, we get no warning of that.  You can do PR_SET_CAPBSET,
> and PR_GET_CAPBSET shows the right results after.  But you are in
> no way constrained by that bset.
> 
> It's not clear how to fix that, because of the weird ways in which
> commoncap.c is included in the kernel.  There is no config variable
> you can rely on to know whether it is included or not.  All values
> for cap_bset are valid so I can't rely on an invalid value to mean
> we're not using it.  So the only options that come to mind are to
> create a a global variable using_capabilities, and define an
> __init function in security/commoncap.c that sets that to one.  That,
> or really tweak security/Kconfig so we can in fact know when commoncap
> will be defined.
> 
> Secondly, after setting the bcap, the current process'
> capabilities are not reduced.  It takes effect after future
> execs.  Is that deemed counterintuitive?  Or will it be
> sufficient to properly document that in the prctl manpage?
> 
> thanks,
> -serge

fwiw if anyone was actually thinking about these, I've
addressed both in a new patchset.  Unfortunately adequate
testing will have to wait until next week so I'll send the
set out after that.

thanks,
-serge


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