VFS: don't do protected {sym,hard}links by default
In commit 800179c9 ("This adds symlink and hardlink restrictions to the Linux VFS"), the new link protections were enabled by default, in the hope that no actual application would care, despite it being technically against legacy UNIX (and documented POSIX) behavior. However, it does turn out to break some applications. It's rare, and it's unfortunate, but it's unacceptable to break existing systems, so we'll have to default to legacy behavior. In particular, it has broken the way AFD distributes files, see http://www.dwd.de/AFD/ along with some legacy scripts. Distributions can end up setting this at initrd time or in system scripts: if you have security problems due to link attacks during your early boot sequence, you have bigger problems than some kernel sysctl setting. Do: echo 1 > /proc/sys/fs/protected_symlinks echo 1 > /proc/sys/fs/protected_hardlinks to re-enable the link protections. Alternatively, we may at some point introduce a kernel config option that sets these kinds of "more secure but not traditional" behavioural options automatically. Reported-by: Nick Bowler <nbowler@elliptictech.com> Reported-by: Holger Kiehl <Holger.Kiehl@dwd.de> Cc: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org> Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk> Cc: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> Cc: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> Cc: stable@kernel.org # v3.6 Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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