[GSOC] capsicum report week5

Joris Giovannangeli joris at giovannangeli.fr
Mon Jul 22 04:02:31 PDT 2013


Hi,

this week has not been much productive. I first tried to implement
capability mode for process using separated syscall tables for process
in capability mode. It ended up being overkill and I needed to modify
various place of the imgact framework. I had to modify the sysent
structure to have a private part for each process to store the syscall
table pointer, and i needed to store the capability mode syscall table
for each executable type. At the end, I've let this approach down, and I
fallback to the freeBSD way. I'm done with the modifications of
makesyscalls.sh to add flags to the syscall table.

During the second part of the week, I've been converting various call to
holdvnode/holdsock in the kernel to the capsicum API, which took me some
time because I had to check the semantic of the calling function to make
sure I'd chosen the good set of rights.

I then spent some time understanding the namecache code to implement
capsicum for nlookup. In capability mode, absolute lookup are not
allowed, only relative lookups from the *at syscall family are
permitted. For that, we need a strictly relative lookup. FreeBSD choose
to forbid .. in paths, that way lookups are always strictly relative,
but it breaks compatibility. Matt suggested another solution : maintain
a counter which is incremented when the path is lookup down, and
decremented when .. is encountered. If the counter is positive, we are
supposed to be in the sandbox. Using the parent pointer, we can verify
that we are actually still in the sandbox. If not, a race has occur, and
we must relookup the path.

The first idea was to allow absolute symlink too, and assume that what
is under the symlink target is also in the sandbox. But I don't see how
to prevent race easily, and freeBSD does not allow that. For now, i'm
not allowing it either.

Thanks,
joris


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