Re: [PATCH v3 0/4] Improved seccomp logging

[Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>]

On Wed, Feb 15, 2017 at 7:24 PM, Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 13, 2017 at 7:45 PM, Tyler Hicks <tyhicks@canonical.com> wrote:
>> This patch set is the third revision of the following two previously
>> submitted patch sets:
>>
>> v1: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1483375990-14948-1-git-send-email-tyhicks@canonical.com
>> v1: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1483377999-15019-2-git-send-email-tyhicks@canonical.com
>>
>> v2: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1486100262-32391-1-git-send-email-tyhicks@canonical.com
>>
>> The patch set aims to address some known deficiencies in seccomp's current
>> logging capabilities:
>>
>>   1. Inability to log all filter actions.
>>   2. Inability to selectively enable filtering; e.g. devs want noisy logging,
>>      users want relative quiet.
>>   3. Consistent behavior with audit enabled and disabled.
>>   4. Inability to easily develop a filter due to the lack of a
>>      permissive/complain mode.
>
> I think I dislike this, but I think my dislikes may be fixable with
> minor changes.
>
> What I dislike is that this mixes app-specific built-in configuration
> (seccomp) with global privileged stuff (audit).  The result is a
> potentially difficult to use situation in which you need to modify an
> app to make it loggable (using RET_LOG) and then fiddle with
> privileged config (auditctl, etc) to actually see the logs.

You make a good point about RET_LOG vs log_max_action. I think making
RET_LOG the default value would work for 99% of the cases.

> What if, instead of logging straight to the audit log, SECCOMP_RET_LOG
> [1] merely meant "tell our parent about this syscall"?  (Ideally we'd
> also figure out a way to express "log this and allow", "log this and
> do ERRNO", etc.)  Then we could have another mechanism that installs a
> layer in the seccomp stack that, instead of catching syscalls, catches
> log events and sticks them in a ring buffer (or audit).

So, I really don't like this because it's yet another logging system.
We already have a security event logger: audit. This continues to use
that subsystem without changing semantics very much.

> Concretely, it might work like this.  If a filter returns
> SECCOMP_RET_LOG, then we "log" and keep processing.  SECCOMP_RET_LOG
> is otherwise treated literally like SECCOMP_RET_ALLOW and has no
> effect on return value.  If you want log-and-kill, you install two
> filters.
>
> There's a new seccomp(2) action that returns an fd.  That fd
> references a new thing in the seccomp stack that is a BPF program that
> is called whenever SECCOMP_RET_LOG is returned from lower down.  The
> output of this filter determines whether the log event is ignored,
> stuck in the ring buffer, or passed up the stack for further
> processing.  You read(2) the fd to access the ring buffer.
>
> Using this mechanism, you could write a simple seccomptrace tool that
> needs no privilege and dumps SECCOMP_RET_LOG events from the target
> program to stderr.

If someone was going to do this, they could just as well set up a
tracer to use RET_TRAP. (And this is what things like minijail does
already, IIRC.) The reality of the situation is that this is way too
much overhead for the common case. We need a generalized logging
system that uses the existing logging mechanisms.

> Thoughts?
>
> [1] If we went this route, it might want to be renamed.
>
> P.S. We ought to be able to write a BPF verifier pass that makes sure
> that filters don't return unsupported return values if we cared to do
> so.

Can we? I thought the BPF_RET used the BPF registers, and validating
that might be less-than-easy?

-Kees

-- 
Kees Cook
Pixel Security