[musl] Re: Tweaking the program name for <err.h> functions

[Rich Felker]

On Tue, Mar 12, 2024 at 03:23:32AM +0000, Gabriel Ravier wrote:
> On 3/12/24 00:43, Rich Felker wrote:
> >On Tue, Mar 12, 2024 at 12:18:24AM +0000, Gabriel Ravier wrote:
> >>On 3/11/24 19:47, Rich Felker wrote:
> >>>On Mon, Mar 11, 2024 at 11:30:04AM -0400, Skyler Ferrante (RIT Student) wrote:
> >>>>Hmm, maybe I'm missing something, but it seems you can close(fd) for
> >>>>the standard fds and then call execve, and the new process image will
> >>>>have no fd 0,1,2. I've tried this on a default Ubuntu 22.04 system.
> >>>>This seems to affect shadow-utils and other setuid/setgid binaries.
> >>>>
> >>>>Here is a repo I built for testing,
> >>>>https://github.com/skyler-ferrante/fd_omission/. What is the correct
> >>>>glibc behavior? Am I misunderstanding something?
> >>>As Florian noted, you're missing that strace cannot invoke it suid.
> >>>POSIX explicitly permits the implementation to open these fds if they
> >>>started closed in suid execs, and IIRC indicates as a future direction
> >>>that it might be permitted for all execs. We do the same in musl in
> >>>the suid case. So really the only way that "writing attacker
> >>>controlled prefix strings to fd 2" becomes an issue is if the
> >>>application erroneously closes fd 2 and lets something else get opened
> >>>on it.
> >>>
> >>>(Aside: making _FORTIFY_SOURCE>1 trap close(n) with n<3 would be an
> >>>interesting idea... :)
> >>Doing this would break many programs, such as:
> >>- most of coreutils, e.g. programs like ls, cat or head, since they
> >>always `close` their input and output descriptors (when they've
> >>written or read something) to make sure to diagnose all errors
> >>- grep
> >>- xargs
> >>- find
> >This makes it so they can malfunction during exit when it
> >flushes/closes the corresponding stdio FILEs. If nothing else has been
> >opened in the mean time, under typical implementations it should be
> >safe, but I think per 2.5.1 Interaction of File Descriptors and
> >Standard I/O Streams:
> >
> >https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/V2_chap02.html#tag_15_05_01
> >
> >it's undefined.
> >
> >The safe way to do what they want is to dup the fd they want to
> >close-and-check-for-errors, open /dev/null, dup2 that over the
> >original fd, then close the first dup.
> >
> >Or, don't exit()/return-from-main, but instead _exit, so there's no
> >subsequent access to the FILE.
> 
> 
> Those applications above (though some of those below appear to do
> raw /close/ calls) all circumvent your objection by calling /fclose/
> on the standard streams rather than /close/-ing the file descriptors
> directly, which seems legal according to POSIX given otherwise the
> following quote would make no sense:

OK, in that case, _FORTIFY_SOURCE>1 trapping close(n) for n<3 would
not affect them, since they're calling fclose not close...

None of this is particularly intended as a serious proposal, but it
could be interesting to experiment with and catch programs with
dubious behavior that might be a bug.

Rich