A full expalantion of io_uring is beyond the scope of this commit
description, but in summary it is an asynchronous I/O mechanism
which allows for I/O requests and the resulting data to be queued
in memory mapped "rings" which are shared between the kernel and
userspace. Optionally, io_uring offers the ability for applications
to spawn kernel threads to dequeue I/O requests from the ring and
submit the requests in the kernel, helping to minimize the syscall
overhead. Rings are accessed in userspace by memory mapping a file
descriptor provided by the io_uring_setup(2), and can be shared
between applications as one might do with any open file descriptor.
Finally, process credentials can be registered with a given ring
and any process with access to that ring can submit I/O requests
using any of the registered credentials.
While the io_uring functionality is widely recognized as offering a
vastly improved, and high performing asynchronous I/O mechanism, its
ability to allow processes to submit I/O requests with credentials
other than its own presents a challenge to LSMs. When a process
creates a new io_uring ring the ring's credentials are inhertied
from the calling process; if this ring is shared with another
process operating with different credentials there is the potential
to bypass the LSMs security policy. Similarly, registering
credentials with a given ring allows any process with access to that
ring to submit I/O requests with those credentials.
In an effort to allow LSMs to apply security policy to io_uring I/O
operations, this patch adds two new LSM hooks. These hooks, in
conjunction with the LSM anonymous inode support previously
submitted, allow an LSM to apply access control policy to the
sharing of io_uring rings as well as any io_uring credential changes
requested by a process.
The new LSM hooks are described below:
* int security_uring_override_creds(cred)
Controls if the current task, executing an io_uring operation,
is allowed to override it's credentials with @cred. In cases
where the current task is a user application, the current
credentials will be those of the user application. In cases
where the current task is a kernel thread servicing io_uring
requests the current credentials will be those of the io_uring
ring (inherited from the process that created the ring).
* int security_uring_sqpoll(void)
Controls if the current task is allowed to create an io_uring
polling thread (IORING_SETUP_SQPOLL). Without a SQPOLL thread
in the kernel processes must submit I/O requests via
io_uring_enter(2) which allows us to compare any requested
credential changes against the application making the request.
With a SQPOLL thread, we can no longer compare requested
credential changes against the application making the request,
the comparison is made against the ring's credentials.
Signed-off-by: Paul Moore <paul@paul-moore.com>
cdc1404a40