Re: [PATCH v2] lockdown,selinux: avoid bogus SELinux lockdown permission checks

From: Ondrej Mosnacek
Date: Wed May 26 2021 - 07:45:30 EST


On Mon, May 17, 2021 at 1:00 PM Michael Ellerman <mpe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Ondrej Mosnacek <omosnace@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> > Commit 59438b46471a ("security,lockdown,selinux: implement SELinux
> > lockdown") added an implementation of the locked_down LSM hook to
> > SELinux, with the aim to restrict which domains are allowed to perform
> > operations that would breach lockdown.
> >
> > However, in several places the security_locked_down() hook is called in
> > situations where the current task isn't doing any action that would
> > directly breach lockdown, leading to SELinux checks that are basically
> > bogus.
> >
> > Since in most of these situations converting the callers such that
> > security_locked_down() is called in a context where the current task
> > would be meaningful for SELinux is impossible or very non-trivial (and
> > could lead to TOCTOU issues for the classic Lockdown LSM
> > implementation), fix this by modifying the hook to accept a struct cred
> > pointer as argument, where NULL will be interpreted as a request for a
> > "global", task-independent lockdown decision only. Then modify SELinux
> > to ignore calls with cred == NULL.
> >
> > Since most callers will just want to pass current_cred() as the cred
> > parameter, rename the hook to security_cred_locked_down() and provide
> > the original security_locked_down() function as a simple wrapper around
> > the new hook.
> >
> > The callers migrated to the new hook, passing NULL as cred:
> > 1. arch/powerpc/xmon/xmon.c
> > Here the hook seems to be called from non-task context and is only
> > used for redacting some sensitive values from output sent to
> > userspace.
>
> It's hard to follow but it actually disables interactive use of xmon
> entirely if lockdown is in confidentiality mode, and disables
> modifications of the kernel in integrity mode.
>
> But that's not really that important, the patch looks fine.
>
> Acked-by: Michael Ellerman <mpe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> (powerpc)

Thanks, Michael!

James/Paul, is there anything blocking this patch from being merged?
Especially the BPF case is causing real trouble for people and the
only workaround is to broadly allow lockdown::confidentiality in the
policy.

--
Ondrej Mosnacek
Software Engineer, Linux Security - SELinux kernel
Red Hat, Inc.