[PATCH 0/6] File Sealing & memfd_create()

[tytso at mit.edu]

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 04:48:30PM +0100, David Herrmann wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 4:32 PM,  <tytso at mit.edu> wrote:
> > Why not make sealing an attribute of the "struct file", and enforce it
> > at the VFS layer?  That way all file system objects would have access
> > to sealing interface, and for memfd_shmem, you can't get another
> > struct file pointing at the object, the security properties would be
> > identical.
> 
> Sealing as introduced here is an inode-attribute, not "struct file".
> This is intentional. For instance, a gfx-client can get a read-only FD
> via /proc/self/fd/ and pass it to the compositor so it can never
> overwrite the contents (unless the compositor has write-access to the
> inode itself, in which case it can just re-open it read-write).

Hmm, good point.  I had forgotten about the /proc/self/fd hole.
Hmm... what if we have a SEAL_PROC which forces the permissions of
/proc/self/fd to be 000?

So if it is a property of the attribute, SEAL_WRITE and SEAL_GROW is
basically equivalent to using chattr to set the immutable and
append-only attribute, except for the "you can't undo the seal unless
you have exclusive access to the inode" magic.

That does make it pretty memfd_create specific and not a very general
API, which is a little unfortunate; hence why I'm trying to explore
ways of making a bit more generic and hopefully useful for more use
cases.

Cheers,

					- Ted