Re: Chromium sandbox on LoongArch and statx -- seccomp deep argument inspection again?

From: Xi Ruoyao <xry111@xry111.site>
To: Icenowy Zheng <uwu@icenowy.me>,
	Huacai Chen <chenhuacai@kernel.org>,
	 WANG Xuerui <kernel@xen0n.name>
Cc: linux-api@vger.kernel.org, Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>,
	Christian Brauner <brauner@kernel.org>,
	Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>,
	Xuefeng Li <lixuefeng@loongson.cn>,
	Jianmin Lv <lvjianmin@loongson.cn>,
	Xiaotian Wu <wuxiaotian@loongson.cn>,
	WANG Rui <wangrui@loongson.cn>,
	Miao Wang <shankerwangmiao@gmail.com>,
	"loongarch@lists.linux.dev" <loongarch@lists.linux.dev>,
	linux-arch <linux-arch@vger.kernel.org>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: Chromium sandbox on LoongArch and statx -- seccomp deep argument inspection again?
Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2024 15:32:23 +0800	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <24c47463f9b469bdc03e415d953d1ca926d83680.camel@xry111.site> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <f063e65df92228cac6e57b0c21de6b750cf47e42.camel@icenowy.me>

On Sun, 2024-02-25 at 14:51 +0800, Icenowy Zheng wrote:
> > From my point of view, I prefer to "restore fstat", because we need
> > to
> > use the Chrome sandbox everyday (even though it hasn't been upstream
> > by now). But I also hope "seccomp deep argument inspection" can be
> > solved in the future.
> 
> My idea is this problem needs syscalls to be designed with deep
> argument inspection in mind; syscalls before this should be considered
> as historical error and get fixed by resotring old syscalls.

I'd not consider fstat an error as using statx for fstat has a
performance impact (severe for some workflows), and Linus has concluded
"if the user wants fstat, give them fstat" for the performance issue:

https://sourceware.org/pipermail/libc-alpha/2023-September/151365.html

However we only want fstat (actually "newfstat" in fs/stat.c), and it
seems we don't want to resurrect newstat, newlstat, newfstatat, etc. (or
am I missing any benefit - performance or "just pleasing seccomp" - of
them comparing to statx?) so we don't want to just define
__ARCH_WANT_NEW_STAT.  So it seems we need to add some new #if to
fs/stat.c and include/uapi/asm-generic/unistd.h.

And no, it's not a design issue of all other syscalls.  It's just the
design issue of seccomp.  There's no way to design a syscall allowing
seccomp to inspect a 100-character path in its argument unless
refactoring seccomp entirely because we cannot fit a 100-character path
into 8 registers.

As at now people do use PTRACE_PEEKDATA for "deep inspection" (actually
"debugging" the target process) but it obviously makes a very severe
performance impact.

<rant>

Today the entire software industry is saying "do things in a declarative
way" but seccomp is completely the opposite.  It's auditing *how* the
sandboxed application is doing things instead of *what* will be done.

I've raised my against to seccomp and/or syscall allowlisting several
times after seeing so many breakages like:

- https://github.com/NetworkConfiguration/dhcpcd/issues/120
- https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/tracker-miners/-/issues/252
- https://blog.pintia.cn/2018/06/27/glibc-segmentation-fault/
- http://web.archive.org/web/20210126121421/http://acm.xidian.edu.cn/discuss/thread.php?tid=148&cid=# (comment 3)

but people just keep telling me "you are wrong, you don't understand
security".  Some of them even complain "seccomp is broken" as well but
still keep using it.

</rant>

-- 
Xi Ruoyao <xry111@xry111.site>
School of Aerospace Science and Technology, Xidian University