For review: seccomp_user_notif(2) manual page

Jann Horn jannh at google.com
Mon Oct 26 09:51:02 UTC 2020


On Mon, Oct 26, 2020 at 1:32 AM Kees Cook <keescook at chromium.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 01, 2020 at 03:52:02AM +0200, Jann Horn wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 1, 2020 at 1:25 AM Tycho Andersen <tycho at tycho.pizza> wrote:
> > > On Thu, Oct 01, 2020 at 01:11:33AM +0200, Jann Horn wrote:
> > > > On Thu, Oct 1, 2020 at 1:03 AM Tycho Andersen <tycho at tycho.pizza> wrote:
> > > > > On Wed, Sep 30, 2020 at 10:34:51PM +0200, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote:
> > > > > > On 9/30/20 5:03 PM, Tycho Andersen wrote:
> > > > > > > On Wed, Sep 30, 2020 at 01:07:38PM +0200, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote:
> > > > > > >>        ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
> > > > > > >>        │FIXME                                                │
> > > > > > >>        ├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
> > > > > > >>        │From my experiments,  it  appears  that  if  a  SEC‐ │
> > > > > > >>        │COMP_IOCTL_NOTIF_RECV   is  done  after  the  target │
> > > > > > >>        │process terminates, then the ioctl()  simply  blocks │
> > > > > > >>        │(rather than returning an error to indicate that the │
> > > > > > >>        │target process no longer exists).                    │
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > Yeah, I think Christian wanted to fix this at some point,
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Do you have a pointer that discussion? I could not find it with a
> > > > > > quick search.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > > but it's a
> > > > > > > bit sticky to do.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Can you say a few words about the nature of the problem?
> > > > >
> > > > > I remembered wrong, it's actually in the tree: 99cdb8b9a573 ("seccomp:
> > > > > notify about unused filter"). So maybe there's a bug here?
> > > >
> > > > That thing only notifies on ->poll, it doesn't unblock ioctls; and
> > > > Michael's sample code uses SECCOMP_IOCTL_NOTIF_RECV to wait. So that
> > > > commit doesn't have any effect on this kind of usage.
> > >
> > > Yes, thanks. And the ones stuck in RECV are waiting on a semaphore so
> > > we don't have a count of all of them, unfortunately.
> > >
> > > We could maybe look inside the wait_list, but that will probably make
> > > people angry :)
> >
> > The easiest way would probably be to open-code the semaphore-ish part,
> > and let the semaphore and poll share the waitqueue. The current code
> > kind of mirrors the semaphore's waitqueue in the wqh - open-coding the
> > entire semaphore would IMO be cleaner than that. And it's not like
> > semaphore semantics are even a good fit for this code anyway.
> >
> > Let's see... if we didn't have the existing UAPI to worry about, I'd
> > do it as follows (*completely* untested). That way, the ioctl would
> > block exactly until either there actually is a request to deliver or
> > there are no more users of the filter. The problem is that if we just
> > apply this patch, existing users of SECCOMP_IOCTL_NOTIF_RECV that use
> > an event loop and don't set O_NONBLOCK will be screwed. So we'd
>
> Wait, why? Do you mean a ioctl calling loop (rather than a poll event
> loop)?

No, I'm talking about poll event loops.

> I think poll would be fine, but a "try calling RECV and expect to
> return ENOENT" loop would change. But I don't think anyone would do this
> exactly because it _currently_ acts like O_NONBLOCK, yes?
>
> > probably also have to add some stupid counter in place of the
> > semaphore's counter that we can use to preserve the old behavior of
> > returning -ENOENT once for each cancelled request. :(
>
> I only see this in Debian Code Search:
> https://sources.debian.org/src/crun/0.15+dfsg-1/src/libcrun/seccomp_notify.c/?hl=166#L166
> which is using epoll_wait():
> https://sources.debian.org/src/crun/0.15+dfsg-1/src/libcrun/container.c/?hl=1326#L1326
>
> I expect LXC is using it. :)

The problem is the scenario where a process is interrupted while it's
waiting for the supervisor to reply.

Consider the following scenario (with supervisor "S" and target "T"; S
wants to wait for events on two file descriptors seccomp_fd and
other_fd):

S: starts poll() to wait for events on seccomp_fd and other_fd
T: performs a syscall that's filtered with RET_USER_NOTIF
S: poll() returns and signals readiness of seccomp_fd
T: receives signal SIGUSR1
T: syscall aborts, enters signal handler
T: signal handler blocks on unfiltered syscall (e.g. write())
S: starts SECCOMP_IOCTL_NOTIF_RECV
S: blocks because no syscalls are pending

Depending on what other_fd is, this could in a worst case even lead to
a deadlock (if e.g. the signal handler wants to write to stdout, but
the stdout fd is hooked up to other_fd in the supervisor, but the
supervisor can't consume the data written because it's stuck in
seccomp handling).

So we have to ensure that when existing code (like that crun code you
linked to) triggers this case, SECCOMP_IOCTL_NOTIF_RECV returns
immediately instead of blocking.

(Oh, but by the way, that crun code looks broken anyway, because
AFAICS it treats all error returns from SECCOMP_IOCTL_NOTIF_RECV
equally by bailing out; and it kinda looks like that bailout path then
nukes the container, or something? So that needs to be fixed either
way.)


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