Re: [RFC v2 09/10] landlock: Handle cgroups (performance)

[Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2016 at 6:36 PM, Alexei Starovoitov
<alexei.starovoitov@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 30, 2016 at 02:45:14PM -0700, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
>>
>> One might argue that landlock shouldn't be tied to seccomp (in theory,
>> attached progs could be given access to syscall_get_xyz()), but I
>
> proposed lsm is way more powerful than syscall_get_xyz.
> no need to dumb it down.

I think you're misunderstanding me.

Mickaël's code allows one to make the LSM hook filters depend on the
syscall using SECCOMP_RET_LANDLOCK.  I'm suggesting that a similar
effect could be achieved by allowing the eBPF LSM hook to call
syscall_get_xyz() if it wants to.

>
>> think that the seccomp attachment mechanism is the right way to
>> install unprivileged filters.  It handles the no_new_privs stuff, it
>> allows TSYNC, it's totally independent of systemwide policy, etc.
>>
>> Trying to use cgroups or similar for this is going to be much nastier.
>> Some tighter sandboxes (Sandstorm, etc) aren't even going to dream of
>> putting cgroupfs in their containers, so requiring cgroups or similar
>> would be a mess for that type of application.
>
> I don't see why it is a 'mess'. cgroups are already used by majority
> of the systems, so I don't see why requiring a cgroup is such a big deal.

Requiring cgroup to be configured in isn't a big deal.  Requiring

> But let's say we don't do them. How implementation is going to look like
> for task based hierarchy? Note that we need an array of bpf_prog pointers.
> One for each lsm hook. Where this array is going to be stored?
> We cannot put in task_struct, since it's too large. Cannot put it
> into 'struct seccomp' directly either, unless it will become a pointer.
> Is that the proposal?

It would go in struct seccomp_filter or in something pointed to from there.

> So now we will be wasting extra 1kbyte of memory per task. Not great.
> We'd want to optimize it by sharing this such struct seccomp with prog array
> across threads of the same task? Or dynimically allocating it when
> landlock is in use? May sound nice, but how to account for that kernel
> memory? I guess also solvable by charging memlock.
> With cgroup based approach we don't need to worry about all that.
>

The considerations are essentially identical either way.

With cgroups, if you want to share the memory between multiple
separate sandboxes (Firejail instances, Sandstorm grains, Chromium
instances, xdg-apps, etc), you'd need to get them to all coordinate to
share a cgroup.  With a seccomp-like interface, you'd need to get them
to coordinate to share an installed layer (using my FD idea or
similar).

There would *not* be any duplication of this memory just because a
sandboxed process called fork().

--Andy

-- 
Andy Lutomirski
AMA Capital Management, LLC