Re: [PATCH v5 0/3] implement OA2_CRED_INHERIT flag for openat2()

[Andy Lutomirski]

On Mon, May 6, 2024 at 10:29 AM Andy Lutomirski <luto@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Replying to a couple emails at once...
>
> On Mon, May 6, 2024 at 12:14 AM Aleksa Sarai <cyphar@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> > I also find it somewhat amusing that this proposal is to basically give
> > up on multi-user permissions for this one directory tree because it's
> > too annoying to deal with. In that case, isn't chmod 777 a simpler
> > solution? (I'm being a bit flippant, of course there is a difference,
> > but the net result is that all users in the container would have the
> > same permissions with all of the fun issues that implies.)
> >
> > In short, AFAICS idmapped mounts pretty much solve this problem (minus
> > the ability to collapse users, which I suspect is not a good idea in
> > general)?
> >
>
> With my kernel hat on, maybe I agree.  But with my *user* hat on, I
> think I pretty strongly disagree.  Look, idmapis lousy for
> unprivileged use:
>
> $ install -m 0700 -d test_directory
> $ echo 'hi there' >test_directory/file
> $ podman run -it --rm
> --mount=type=bind,src=test_directory,dst=/tmp,idmap [debian-slim]
> # cat /tmp/file
> hi there
>
> <-- Hey, look, this kind of works!
>
> # setpriv --reuid=1 ls /tmp
> ls: cannot open directory '/tmp': Permission denied
>
> <-- Gee, thanks, Linux!

I should add: this is lousy even for privileged use.  On a normal
non-containerized system:

$ ls -ld /var/lib/mysql
drwxr-xr-x. 3 mysql mysql 4096 Sep 20  2023 /var/lib/mysql

This makes perfect sense.

But if I want to run mysql in a container in a sane way, my only real
choice is either to trust the container manager quite strongly (so it
only maps this directory into the correct container) or, if I want to
separate out management of this container into its own UID (which is a
good practice), then I'm forced to do some kind of fragile hack like
making a directory only accessible to the correct UID and then
creating a 0777 directory inside it and bind-mounting *that*.