Currently, SELinux doesn't allow distinguishing between kernel threads
and userspace processes that are started before the policy is first
loaded - both get the label corresponding to the kernel SID. The only
way a process that persists from early boot can get a meaningful label
is by doing a voluntary dyntransition or re-executing itself.
Reusing the kernel label for userspace processes is problematic for
several reasons:
1. The kernel is considered to be a privileged domain and generally
needs to have a wide range of permissions allowed to work correctly,
which prevents the policy writer from effectively hardening against
early boot processes that might remain running unintentionally after
the policy is loaded (they represent a potential extra attack surface
that should be mitigated).
2. Despite the kernel being treated as a privileged domain, the policy
writer may want to impose certain special limitations on kernel
threads that may conflict with the requirements of intentional early
boot processes. For example, it is a good hardening practice to limit
what executables the kernel can execute as usermode helpers and to
confine the resulting usermode helper processes. However, a
(legitimate) process surviving from early boot may need to execute a
different set of executables.
3. As currently implemented, overlayfs remembers the security context of
the process that created an overlayfs mount and uses it to bound
subsequent operations on files using this context. If an overlayfs
mount is created before the SELinux policy is loaded, these "mounter"
checks are made against the kernel context, which may clash with
restrictions on the kernel domain (see 2.).
To resolve this, introduce a new initial SID (reusing the slot of the
former "init" initial SID) that will be assigned to any userspace
process started before the policy is first loaded. This is easy to do,
as we can simply label any process that goes through the
bprm_creds_for_exec LSM hook with the new init-SID instead of
propagating the kernel SID from the parent.
To provide backwards compatibility for existing policies that are
unaware of this new semantic of the "init" initial SID, introduce a new
policy capability "userspace_initial_context" and set the "init" SID to
the same context as the "kernel" SID unless this capability is set by
the policy.
Another small backwards compatibility measure is needed in
security_sid_to_context_core() for before the initial SELinux policy
load - see the code comment for explanation.
Signed-off-by: Ondrej Mosnacek <omosnace@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Stephen Smalley <stephen.smalley.work@gmail.com>
[PM: edited comments based on feedback/discussion]
Signed-off-by: Paul Moore <paul@paul-moore.com>
ae254858ce