• Ondrej Mosnacek's avatar
    selinux: introduce an initial SID for early boot processes · 5b0eea83
    Ondrej Mosnacek authored
    Currently, SELinux doesn't allow distinguishing between kernel threads
    and userspace processes that are started before the policy is first
    loaded - both get the label corresponding to the kernel SID. The only
    way a process that persists from early boot can get a meaningful label
    is by doing a voluntary dyntransition or re-executing itself.
    
    Reusing the kernel label for userspace processes is problematic for
    several reasons:
    1. The kernel is considered to be a privileged domain and generally
       needs to have a wide range of permissions allowed to work correctly,
       which prevents the policy writer from effectively hardening against
       early boot processes that might remain running unintentionally after
       the policy is loaded (they represent a potential extra attack surface
       that should be mitigated).
    2. Despite the kernel being treated as a privileged domain, the policy
       writer may want to impose certain special limitations on kernel
       threads that may conflict with the requirements of intentional early
       boot processes. For example, it is a good hardening practice to limit
       what executables the kernel can execute as usermode helpers and to
       confine the resulting usermode helper processes. However, a
       (legitimate) process surviving from early boot may need to execute a
       different set of executables.
    3. As currently implemented, overlayfs remembers the security context of
       the process that created an overlayfs mount and uses it to bound
       subsequent operations on files using this context. If an overlayfs
       mount is created before the SELinux policy is loaded, these "mounter"
       checks are made against the kernel context, which may clash with
       restrictions on the kernel domain (see 2.).
    
    To resolve this, introduce a new initial SID (reusing the slot of the
    former "init" initial SID) that will be assigned to any userspace
    process started before the policy is first loaded. This is easy to do,
    as we can simply label any process that goes through the
    bprm_creds_for_exec LSM hook with the new init-SID instead of
    propagating the kernel SID from the parent.
    
    To provide backwards compatibility for existing policies that are
    unaware of this new semantic of the "init" initial SID, introduce a new
    policy capability "userspace_initial_context" and set the "init" SID to
    the same context as the "kernel" SID unless this capability is set by
    the policy.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarOndrej Mosnacek <omosnace@redhat.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarPaul Moore <paul@paul-moore.com>
    5b0eea83
initial_sid_to_string.h 365 Bytes