diff mbox series

[1/3] man: Document pitfall with negative permissions and user namespaces

Message ID 20230829205833.14873-2-richard@nod.at (mailing list archive)
State New, archived
Headers show
Series Document impact of user namespaces and negative permissions | expand

Commit Message

Richard Weinberger Aug. 29, 2023, 8:58 p.m. UTC
It is little known that user namespaces and some helpers
can be used to bypass negative permissions.

Signed-off-by: Richard Weinberger <richard@nod.at>
---
This patch applies to the acl software project.
---
 man/man5/acl.5 | 15 +++++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 15 insertions(+)

Comments

Christian Brauner Aug. 30, 2023, 8:19 a.m. UTC | #1
On Tue, Aug 29, 2023 at 10:58:31PM +0200, Richard Weinberger wrote:
> It is little known that user namespaces and some helpers
> can be used to bypass negative permissions.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Richard Weinberger <richard@nod.at>
> ---
> This patch applies to the acl software project.
> ---
>  man/man5/acl.5 | 15 +++++++++++++++
>  1 file changed, 15 insertions(+)
> 
> diff --git a/man/man5/acl.5 b/man/man5/acl.5
> index 0db86b325617..2ed144742e37 100644
> --- a/man/man5/acl.5
> +++ b/man/man5/acl.5
> @@ -495,5 +495,20 @@ These non-portable extensions are available on Linux systems.
>  .Xr acl_from_mode 3 ,
>  .Xr acl_get_perm 3 ,
>  .Xr acl_to_any_text 3
> +.Sh NOTES
> +.Ss Negative permissions and Linux user namespaces
> +While it is technically feasible to establish negative permissions through
> +ACLs, such an approach is widely regarded as a suboptimal practice.
> +Furthermore, the utilization of Linux user namespaces introduces the
> +potential to circumvent specific negative permissions.  This issue stems
> +from the fact that privileged helpers, such as
> +.Xr newuidmap 1 ,
> +enable unprivileged users to create user namespaces with subordinate user and
> +group IDs. As a consequence, users can drop group memberships, resulting
> +in a situation where negative permissions based on group membership no longer
> +apply.
> +For more details, please refer to the
> +.Xr user_namespaces 7
> +documentation.
>  .Sh AUTHOR
>  Andreas Gruenbacher, <andreas.gruenbacher@gmail.com>

Looks good to me,
Acked-by: Christian Brauner <brauner@kernel.org>
diff mbox series

Patch

diff --git a/man/man5/acl.5 b/man/man5/acl.5
index 0db86b325617..2ed144742e37 100644
--- a/man/man5/acl.5
+++ b/man/man5/acl.5
@@ -495,5 +495,20 @@  These non-portable extensions are available on Linux systems.
 .Xr acl_from_mode 3 ,
 .Xr acl_get_perm 3 ,
 .Xr acl_to_any_text 3
+.Sh NOTES
+.Ss Negative permissions and Linux user namespaces
+While it is technically feasible to establish negative permissions through
+ACLs, such an approach is widely regarded as a suboptimal practice.
+Furthermore, the utilization of Linux user namespaces introduces the
+potential to circumvent specific negative permissions.  This issue stems
+from the fact that privileged helpers, such as
+.Xr newuidmap 1 ,
+enable unprivileged users to create user namespaces with subordinate user and
+group IDs. As a consequence, users can drop group memberships, resulting
+in a situation where negative permissions based on group membership no longer
+apply.
+For more details, please refer to the
+.Xr user_namespaces 7
+documentation.
 .Sh AUTHOR
 Andreas Gruenbacher, <andreas.gruenbacher@gmail.com>