[Ocfs2-devel] [PATCH v7 4/6] security: Allow all LSMs to provide xattrs for inode_init_security hook

Mimi Zohar zohar at linux.ibm.com
Mon Feb 20 12:43:24 UTC 2023


On Thu, 2022-12-01 at 11:41 +0100, Roberto Sassu wrote:
> From: Roberto Sassu <roberto.sassu at huawei.com>
> 
> Currently, security_inode_init_security() supports only one LSM providing
> an xattr and EVM calculating the HMAC on that xattr, plus other inode
> metadata.
> 
> Allow all LSMs to provide one or multiple xattrs, by extending the security
> blob reservation mechanism. Introduce the new lbs_xattr field of the
> lsm_blob_sizes structure, so that each LSM can specify how many xattrs it
> needs, and the LSM infrastructure knows how many xattr slots it should
> allocate.
> 
> Dynamically allocate the xattrs array to be populated by LSMs with the
> inode_init_security hook, and pass it to the latter instead of the
> name/value/len triple. Update the documentation accordingly, and fix the
> description of the xattr name, as it is not allocated anymore.
> 
> Since the LSM infrastructure, at initialization time, updates the number of
> the requested xattrs provided by each LSM with a corresponding offset in
> the security blob (in this case the xattr array), it makes straightforward
> for an LSM to access the right position in the xattr array.
> 
> There is still the issue that an LSM might not fill the xattr, even if it
> requests it (legitimate case, for example it might have been loaded but not
> initialized with a policy). Since users of the xattr array (e.g. the
> initxattrs() callbacks) detect the end of the xattr array by checking if
> the xattr name is NULL, not filling an xattr would cause those users to
> stop scanning xattrs prematurely.
> 
> Solve that issue by introducing security_check_compact_filled_xattrs(),
> which does a basic check of the xattr array (if the xattr name is filled,
> the xattr value should be too, and viceversa), and compacts the xattr array
> by removing the holes.
> 
> An alternative solution would be to let users of the xattr array know the
> number of elements of that array, so that they don't have to check the
> termination. However, this seems more invasive, compared to a simple move
> of few array elements.
> 
> security_check_compact_filled_xattrs() also determines how many xattrs in
> the xattr array have been filled. If there is none, skip
> evm_inode_init_security() and initxattrs(). Skipping the former also avoids
> EVM to crash the kernel, as it is expecting a filled xattr.
> 
> Finally, adapt both SELinux and Smack to use the new definition of the
> inode_init_security hook, and to correctly fill the designated slots in the
> xattr array. For Smack, reserve space for the other defined xattrs although
> they are not set yet in smack_inode_init_security().
> 
> Reported-by: Nicolas Bouchinet <nicolas.bouchinet at clip-os.org> (EVM crash)
> Signed-off-by: Roberto Sassu <roberto.sassu at huawei.com>
> Reviewed-by: Casey Schaufler <casey at schaufler-ca.com>

Reviewed-by: Mimi Zohar <zohar at linux.ibm.com>




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