Microsoft Security Researcher Proposes Unprivileged Chroot For Linux
With a patch sent out today he noted, "The chroot system call is currently limited to be used by processes with the CAP_SYS_CHROOT capability. This protects against malicious procesess willing to trick SUID-like binaries. The following patch allows unprivileged users to safely use chroot(2)...Being able to easily change root directories enable to ease some development workflow and can be used as a tool to strengthen unprivileged security sandboxes. chroot(2) is not an access-control mechanism per se, but it can be used to limit the absolute view of the filesystem, and then limit ways to access data and kernel interfaces."
The proposed patch allows no_new_privs tasks to call chroot. Salaün went on to argue his case in the patch message:
Users may not wish to expose namespace complexity to potentially malicious processes, or limit their use because of limited resources. The chroot feature is much more simple (and limited) than the mount namespace, but can still be useful. As for containers, users of chroot(2) should take care of file descriptors or data accessible by other means (e.g. current working directory, leaked FDs, passed FDs, devices, mount points, etc.). There is a lot of literature that discuss the limitations of chroot, and users of this feature should be aware of the multiple ways to bypass it. Using chroot(2) for security purposes can make sense if it is combined with other features (e.g. dedicated user, seccomp, LSM access-controls, etc.).
One could argue that chroot(2) is useless without a properly populated root hierarchy (i.e. without /dev and /proc). However, there are multiple use cases that don't require the chrooting process to create file hierarchies with special files nor mount points, e.g.:
* A process sandboxing itself, once all its libraries are loaded, may not need files other than regular files, or even no file at all.
* Some pre-populated root hierarchies could be used to chroot into, provided for instance by development environments or tailored distributions.
* Processes executed in a chroot may not require access to these special files (e.g. with minimal runtimes, or by emulating some special files with a LD_PRELOADed library or seccomp).
Allowing a task to change its own root directory is not a threat to the system if we can prevent confused deputy attacks, which could be performed through execution of SUID-like binaries. This can be prevented if the calling task sets PR_SET_NO_NEW_PRIVS on itself with prctl(2). To only affect this task, its filesystem information must not be shared with other tasks, which can be achieved by not passing CLONE_FS to clone(2). A similar no_new_privs check is already used by seccomp to avoid the same kind of security issues. Furthermore, because of its security use and to avoid giving a new way for attackers to get out of a chroot (e.g. using /proc//root), an unprivileged chroot is only allowed if the new root directory is the same or beneath the current one. This still allows a process to use a subset of its legitimate filesystem to chroot into and then further reduce its view of the filesystem.
This change may not impact systems relying on other permission models than POSIX capabilities (e.g. Tomoyo). Being able to use chroot(2) on such systems may require to update their security policies.
The change itself is just a 64 line patch but given it's a fundamental shift, we'll see soon enough what the upstream kernel developers think of this Microsoft-led change for allowing unprivileged chroot support on Linux.
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