Re: [RFC PATCH bpf-next v3 00/37] FUSE BPF: A Stacked Filesystem Extension for FUSE

From: Miklos Szeredi <miklos@szeredi.hu>
To: Daniel Rosenberg <drosen@google.com>
Cc: bpf@vger.kernel.org, Alexei Starovoitov <ast@kernel.org>,
	Amir Goldstein <amir73il@gmail.com>,
	linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org,
	linux-unionfs@vger.kernel.org,
	Daniel Borkmann <daniel@iogearbox.net>,
	John Fastabend <john.fastabend@gmail.com>,
	Andrii Nakryiko <andrii@kernel.org>,
	Martin KaFai Lau <martin.lau@linux.dev>,
	Song Liu <song@kernel.org>, Yonghong Song <yhs@fb.com>,
	KP Singh <kpsingh@kernel.org>,
	Stanislav Fomichev <sdf@google.com>, Hao Luo <haoluo@google.com>,
	Jiri Olsa <jolsa@kernel.org>, Shuah Khan <shuah@kernel.org>,
	Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>,
	Joanne Koong <joannelkoong@gmail.com>,
	Mykola Lysenko <mykolal@fb.com>,
	kernel-team@android.com
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH bpf-next v3 00/37] FUSE BPF: A Stacked Filesystem Extension for FUSE
Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2023 17:32:42 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAJfpegtuNgbZfLiKnpzdEP0sNtCt=83NjGtBnmtvMaon2avv2w@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20230418014037.2412394-1-drosen@google.com>

On Tue, 18 Apr 2023 at 03:40, Daniel Rosenberg <drosen@google.com> wrote:
>
> These patches extend FUSE to be able to act as a stacked filesystem. This
> allows pure passthrough, where the fuse file system simply reflects the lower
> filesystem, and also allows optional pre and post filtering in BPF and/or the
> userspace daemon as needed. This can dramatically reduce or even eliminate
> transitions to and from userspace.

I'll ignore BPF for now and concentrate on the passthrough aspect,
which I understand better.

The security model needs to be thought about and documented.  Think
about this: the fuse server now delegates operations it would itself
perform to the passthrough code in fuse.  The permissions that would
have been checked in the context of the fuse server are now checked in
the context of the task performing the operation.  The server may be
able to bypass seccomp restrictions.  Files that are open on the
backing filesystem are now hidden (e.g. lsof won't find these), which
allows the server to obfuscate accesses to backing files.  Etc.

These are not particularly worrying if the server is privileged, but
fuse comes with the history of supporting unprivileged servers, so we
should look at supporting passthrough with unprivileged servers as
well.

My other generic comment is that you should add justification for
doing this in the first place.  I guess it's mainly performance.  So
how performance can be won in real life cases?   It would also be good
to measure the contribution of individual ops to that win.   Is there
another reason for this besides performance?

Thanks,
Miklos