[PATCH review 0/6] Bind mount escape fixes

Eric W. Biederman ebiederm at xmission.com
Mon Aug 3 21:25:18 UTC 2015


It is possible in some situations to rename a file or directory through
one mount point such that it can start out inside of a bind mount and
after the rename wind up outside of the bind mount.  Unfortunately with
user namespaces these conditions can be trivially created by creating a
bind mount under an existing bind mount.

I have identified four situations in which this may be a problem.
- __d_path and d_absolute_path need to error on disconnected paths
  that can not reach some root directory or lsm path based security
  checks can incorrectly succeed.

- Normal path name resolution following .. can lead to a directory
  that is outside of the original loopback mount.

- file handle reconsititution aka exportfs_decode_fh can yield a dentry
  from which d_parent can be followed up to mnt->sb->s_root, but
  d_parent can not be followed up to mnt->mnt_root.

- Mounts on a path that has been renamed outside of a loopback mount
  become unreachable, as there is no possible path that can be passed
  to umount to unmount them.

My strategy:

o File handle reconsitituion problems can be prevented by enabling
  the nfsd subtree checks for nfs exports, and open_by_handle_at
  requires capable(CAP_DAC_READ_SEARCH) so is only usable by the global
  root.  This makes any problems difficult if not impossible to exploit
  in practice so I have not yet written code to address that issue.

o The functions __d_path and d_absolute_path are agumented so that the
  security modules will not be fed a problematic path to work with.

o Following of .. has been agumented to test that after d_parent has
  been resolved the original  directory is connected, and if not
  an error of -ENOENT is returned.

o I do not worry about mounts that are disconnected from their bind
  mount as these mounts can always be freed by either umount -l on
  the bind mount they have escaped from, or by freeing the mount
  namespace.  So I do not believe there is an actual problem.

That name resolution is a common fast path and most of the code in this
patchset is to support keeping following .. from becoming quadratic as
far as is humanly possible.

For the implementation I went back to the drawing board and carefully
read through the affected code, so I could be certain I knew what was
going on, and this wound of with some very significant implementation
changes from a correctness point of view.

On each mount I keep an escape count which is almost but not quite a
seqcount that is bumped each time a directory escapes a mount point.
This allows marking the mounts that do have directories escape and
allows caching of when a path has been verified to have no escapes, so
in the common case even a mount that has had a directory escape will see
only a single call to d_ancestor during path name resolution the first
time .. is encountered.

I have not benchmarked the code but I don't see any reason to expect
anything except for rename will see a performance impact, and then only
in cases with where a rename potentially affects allows a directory to
escape lots of mounts.

Do I have something that is good enough this time, or am I blind and
missing something?

These changes are all against v4.2-rc4. 

For those who like to see everything in a single tree the code is at:

     git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/ebiederm/user-namespace.git for-testing

Eric W. Biederman (6):
      mnt: Track which mounts use a dentry as root.
      dcache: Handle escaped paths in prepend_path
      dcache: Implement d_common_ancestor
      mnt: Track when a directory escapes a bind mount
      vfs: Test for and handle paths that are unreachable from their mnt_root
      vfs: Cache the results of path_connected

 fs/dcache.c            |  90 ++++++++++++++++--
 fs/mount.h             |  25 +++++
 fs/namei.c             |  59 +++++++++++-
 fs/namespace.c         | 243 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-
 include/linux/dcache.h |   8 ++
 5 files changed, 409 insertions(+), 16 deletions(-)


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