This adds symlink and hardlink restrictions to the Linux VFS.
Symlinks:
A long-standing class of security issues is the symlink-based
time-of-check-time-of-use race, most commonly seen in world-writable
directories like /tmp. The common method of exploitation of this flaw
is to cross privilege boundaries when following a given symlink (i.e. a
root process follows a symlink belonging to another user). For a likely
incomplete list of hundreds of examples across the years, please see:
http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=/tmp
The solution is to permit symlinks to only be followed when outside
a sticky world-writable directory, or when the uid of the symlink and
follower match, or when the directory owner matches the symlink's owner.
Some pointers to the history of earlier discussion that I could find:
1996 Aug, Zygo Blaxell
http://marc.info/?l=bugtraq&m=87602167419830&w=2
1996 Oct, Andrew Tridgell
http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/9610.2/0086.html
1997 Dec, Albert D Cahalan
http://lkml.org/lkml/1997/12/16/4
2005 Feb, Lorenzo Hernández García-Hierro
http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0502.0/1896.html
2010 May, Kees Cook
https://lkml.org/lkml/2010/5/30/144
Past objections and rebuttals could be summarized as:
- Violates POSIX.
- POSIX didn't consider this situation and it's not useful to follow
a broken specification at the cost of security.
- Might break unknown applications that use this feature.
- Applications that break because of the change are easy to spot and
fix. Applications that are vulnerable to symlink ToCToU by not having
the change aren't. Additionally, no applications have yet been found
that rely on this behavior.
- Applications should just use mkstemp() or O_CREATE|O_EXCL.
- True, but applications are not perfect, and new software is written
all the time that makes these mistakes; blocking this flaw at the
kernel is a single solution to the entire class of vulnerability.
- This should live in the core VFS.
- This should live in an LSM. (https://lkml.org/lkml/2010/5/31/135)
- This should live in an LSM.
- This should live in the core VFS. (https://lkml.org/lkml/2010/8/2/188)
Hardlinks:
On systems that have user-writable directories on the same partition
as system files, a long-standing class of security issues is the
hardlink-based time-of-check-time-of-use race, most commonly seen in
world-writable directories like /tmp. The common method of exploitation
of this flaw is to cross privilege boundaries when following a given
hardlink (i.e. a root process follows a hardlink created by another
user). Additionally, an issue exists where users can "pin" a potentially
vulnerable setuid/setgid file so that an administrator will not actually
upgrade a system fully.
The solution is to permit hardlinks to only be created when the user is
already the existing file's owner, or if they already have read/write
access to the existing file.
Many Linux users are surprised when they learn they can link to files
they have no access to, so this change appears to follow the doctrine
of "least surprise". Additionally, this change does not violate POSIX,
which states "the implementation may require that the calling process
has permission to access the existing file"[1].
This change is known to break some implementations of the "at" daemon,
though the version used by Fedora and Ubuntu has been fixed[2] for
a while. Otherwise, the change has been undisruptive while in use in
Ubuntu for the last 1.5 years.
[1] http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/linkat.html
[2] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/at.git;a=commitdiff;h=f4114656c3a6c6f6070e315ffdf940a49eda3279
This patch is based on the patches in Openwall and grsecurity, along with
suggestions from Al Viro. I have added a sysctl to enable the protected
behavior, and documentation.
Signed-off-by: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Acked-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
800179c9b8