• Vasiliy Kulikov's avatar
    mm: restrict access to slab files under procfs and sysfs · ab067e99
    Vasiliy Kulikov authored
    Historically /proc/slabinfo and files under /sys/kernel/slab/* have
    world read permissions and are accessible to the world.  slabinfo
    contains rather private information related both to the kernel and
    userspace tasks.  Depending on the situation, it might reveal either
    private information per se or information useful to make another
    targeted attack.  Some examples of what can be learned by
    reading/watching for /proc/slabinfo entries:
    
    1) dentry (and different *inode*) number might reveal other processes fs
    activity.  The number of dentry "active objects" doesn't strictly show
    file count opened/touched by a process, however, there is a good
    correlation between them.  The patch "proc: force dcache drop on
    unauthorized access" relies on the privacy of dentry count.
    
    2) different inode entries might reveal the same information as (1), but
    these are more fine granted counters.  If a filesystem is mounted in a
    private mount point (or even a private namespace) and fs type differs from
    other mounted fs types, fs activity in this mount point/namespace is
    revealed.  If there is a single ecryptfs mount point, the whole fs
    activity of a single user is revealed.  Number of files in ecryptfs
    mount point is a private information per se.
    
    3) fuse_* reveals number of files / fs activity of a user in a user
    private mount point.  It is approx. the same severity as ecryptfs
    infoleak in (2).
    
    4) sysfs_dir_cache similar to (2) reveals devices' addition/removal,
    which can be otherwise hidden by "chmod 0700 /sys/".  With 0444 slabinfo
    the precise number of sysfs files is known to the world.
    
    5) buffer_head might reveal some kernel activity.  With other
    information leaks an attacker might identify what specific kernel
    routines generate buffer_head activity.
    
    6) *kmalloc* infoleaks are very situational.  Attacker should watch for
    the specific kmalloc size entry and filter the noise related to the unrelated
    kernel activity.  If an attacker has relatively silent victim system, he
    might get rather precise counters.
    
    Additional information sources might significantly increase the slabinfo
    infoleak benefits.  E.g. if an attacker knows that the processes
    activity on the system is very low (only core daemons like syslog and
    cron), he may run setxid binaries / trigger local daemon activity /
    trigger network services activity / await sporadic cron jobs activity
    / etc. and get rather precise counters for fs and network activity of
    these privileged tasks, which is unknown otherwise.
    
    Also hiding slabinfo and /sys/kernel/slab/* is a one step to complicate
    exploitation of kernel heap overflows (and possibly, other bugs).  The
    related discussion:
    
    http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1108378
    
    To keep compatibility with old permission model where non-root
    monitoring daemon could watch for kernel memleaks though slabinfo one
    should do:
    
        groupadd slabinfo
        usermod -a -G slabinfo $MONITOR_USER
    
    And add the following commands to init scripts (to mountall.conf in
    Ubuntu's upstart case):
    
        chmod g+r /proc/slabinfo /sys/kernel/slab/*/*
        chgrp slabinfo /proc/slabinfo /sys/kernel/slab/*/*
    Signed-off-by: default avatarVasiliy Kulikov <segoon@openwall.com>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarKees Cook <kees@ubuntu.com>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarDave Hansen <dave@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
    Acked-by: default avatarChristoph Lameter <cl@gentwo.org>
    Acked-by: default avatarDavid Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
    CC: Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu
    CC: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    CC: Alan Cox <alan@linux.intel.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarPekka Enberg <penberg@kernel.org>
    ab067e99
slab.c 119 KB