Containers don't handle keys, but should they?

Serge E. Hallyn serue at us.ibm.com
Fri Mar 14 09:17:11 PDT 2008


Quoting David Howells (dhowells at redhat.com):
> Serge E. Hallyn <serue at us.ibm.com> wrote:
> 
> > It looks like maybe just adding a struct user_namespace * to a struct key
> > should suffice.
> 
> That's not quite sufficient.  The per-UID key_user structs also need to be
> differentiated.  Unfortunately, I can't just merge it into user_struct as I
> then end up with a reference loop user_struct -> uid_keyring -> user_struct.
> 
> Rooting the key_user trees in user_namespace will probably do the trick.
> 
> A couple of questions:
> 
>  (1) A process may inherit a session keyring over clone().  Should this be
>      discarded if CLONE_NEWUSER is set?  Or would I need to copy it?

Someone else may have stronger feelings about this.  Personally so long
as a container setup program has a way of discarding the keyring
manually I think that's fine.

>  (2) In a recent patch, I've given the root user its own quota limits.  Is UID
>      0 always the root user in any container?  Or would it make more sense
>      just to scrap the per-root quota limits?

Yeah uid 0 may not have a bunch of privileges, but it is still the root
user.

thanks,
-serge


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