My Apache module launches a helper subprocess which does, for example, but not limited by, the following things:
It sets up a socket so that it can communicate with Apache.
Reads and writes files in a temporary location that is deleted when Apache exits. These files are used e.g. for storing large amounts of data received over the network, in case that data does not comfortably fit in RAM.
It spawns user-specified executables. Similar to CGI. Each of these spawned processes are run as their own dedicated user.
The helper subprocess is launched as root so that it can manage file ownerships and permissions and can spawn more processes as specific users.
Some users of my module run on systems with SELinux installed, e.g. RedHat-based distros. SELinux usually interferes with my module. Until now I've been telling people to disable SELinux system-wide because I can't figure out how to write a proper policy for my software. Documentation is very scattered, complex and usually only targets system administrators, not software developers.
As a step into the right direction, I want to implement minimal support for SELinux. I'm looking for a way to launch my helper subprocess without any SELinux constraints without disabling SELinux system-wide. Is there a way to do that, and if so, how?
Well... you could write a rule that transitions your domain to unconfined_t, but then you'd piss off quite a few sysadmins. Best to write yourself a new domain that inherits from httpd_t and also adds the appropriate contexts for access.
Related
I have created a script and I want it to be virtually "immune" to SIGSTOP.
I understand that both SIGKILL and SIGSTOP cannot be trapped or ignored.
I know that the init system for Linux cannot receive a "fatal" signal due to it having the SIGNAL_UNKILLABLE flag on its signal struct flags (although the latter half of that sentence flies over my head for the most part).
I'm willing to edit my kernel to grant this script immunity, the only problem is that I don't know how.
So, my question is, is there a way to nullify SIGSTOP for a certain script/process?
I was able to deal with SIGKILL thanks to the Restart parameter in the service file for my script (using systemd), and while I have scrolled through the manuals looking for something similar for suspended processes, I haven't found anything yet.
Is there anything similar to Restart=always for process suspension caused by SIGSTOP?
I would rather not have to go through the process of changing things in or related to the kernel, but if it's the only way I will.
Thanks.
Okay so the best solution I can come up with is SELinux.
SELinux is a kernel add-on created by the NSA that was later released to the public. It is commonly used on Linux systems and comes by default on Android devices. SELinux allows the creation of "contexts". Contexts are an additional label provided to files and processes that allow the subdivision of responsibility and permissions.
How does this solve your problem? Well, you can limit your SELinux permissions for your user processes (even for the root user) so that you're not even allowed to signal this other process at all. In fact, you can prevent any interaction with it whatsoever. If you'd like, you could go so far as to prevent yourself from even being able to turn SELinux off (although it's probably better that you don't if you can avoid it from an operational perspective). This is at some level probably the closest you'll get to a solution that is anywhere near the range of not-hackable. That being said, SELinux setup and configuration for this purpose is not exactly a walk in the park. Documentation is limited (but exists), distro-specific, and in some cases even esoteric. I do have some experience with SELinux myself.
Edit:
Doing some quick googling, it appears possible to install SELinux on Arch, but like most things on Arch, it requires some effort - more than should fit in a StackOverflow comment block. However I'll briefly describe your set of goals here once SELinux is installed:
Determine the context that you are currently in. Using the "id" command should provide this context.
Use a context process transition so that when you execute your script, that script runs in a new context. You will probably need to create a new context for your script to run in.
Create sepolicy rules allowing that script to interact with your processes however you need. Perhaps this includes the ability to kill other processes in a different context, or read from a tcp port using sniffing, etc. etc. You can use the audit2allow program to help you create these rules.
By default, SELinux denies anything it doesn't explicitly allow. Your goal now is to make sure that everything you might want to do on your system is allowed, and add policy rules to allow all those things. Looking at the SELinux audit logs is a great way to see everything SELinux is complaining about - it's your job to go through and convert all those audit failures into "allow" rules.
Once all that is done, just make sure not to "allow" whatever context your processes/shell start in from being able to kill or signal the context that your script runs in, and you should be done. Now trying to SIGSTOP or SIGKILL should generate a "Permission denied error".
This is an imaginary example of what I like to do. Don't take it too literally.
Let say my process is being ran as www-data and I have a lua script called thedevil.lua. It will try to delete, corrupt and cause as much problems as possible. I'd like to fire up a process (or load a shared object) that has a lua interpreter and it will try to ruin all my websites as the user is www-data.
Is there a way I can say lets create this process (or load a library) with LIMITED permissions. Say the script is in /var/www/devilscript/thedevil.lua. I'd like to give it permissions for /tmp/www/devilscript and /var/www/devilscript/. Is that possible? I don't want to create a new user called devilscript and give it limited permissions than run the process as that user. I just want to say I am www-data but I only want to give this process/lib a subset of what I can do.
-edit- Could you give me the name of the functions to execute the said so or binary with lower permissions?
-edit2- Can windows do something like I asked?
Yes, depending on the operating system you are running on, there are various sorts of sandboxing methods available in modern Unix systems. It depends a bit on which one you are running. Under Linux there are almost too many -- SELinux, Apparmor, Tomoyo, and others. FreeBSD has a Mandatory Access Control System as well as the Capsicum capabilities system. Mac OS X has a sandboxing system as well.
Most such systems allow you to reduce the privilege that a particular process gets in a fairly granular manner. In general, capability systems are easier to work with than Mandatory Access Control (MAC) systems, but they are less frequently available.
A primitive way of doing this sort of privilege restriction in older Unix systems was "chrooting" a process, that is, running it in a restricted part of the file hierarchy using the chroot system call. Unfortunately, that remains the only truly portable form of privilege reduction available in Unix systems -- you thus encounter it in the configuration systems of many system daemons.
SELinux will allow you to create a domain that has restricted access to various file contexts and resources, regardless of the user the process is running as (even root).
I'm really new to Linux. I Google'd for couple of days, and installed Java and Tomcat in CentOS.
Now I need a user, that has all privileges in their home directory (including files, subdirs and files in subdirs), but cannot access any other dir.
Also this user has to have a permission to manage one service (I created tomcat service, which I can 'start','stop' and 'restart').
Can anyone explain how to do this?
You've asked for a lot.
There's a few approaches possible:
Entirely with "native" Linux permissions
Using a mandatory access control system
Native Linux permissions
Create this new user their own new group. Make them the only member of this group.
Remove world read, write, execute permissions on all your data files. If any users were getting their privileges to the data files via world permissions, either create new groups for all the users and data as appropriate (maybe one for accounting, one for billing, one for sales, one for engineering, etc. Whatever works.)
Add a new sudoers(5) entry for this user for the sudo stop tomcat, sudo start tomcat, sudo restart tomcat, sudo status tomcat -- or whichever commands this user will need to execute to manage the tomcat service. See visudo(8) for details on editing the sudo(8) config file.
If you really want to lock this user down, copy in the utilities that this person will need into their ~/bin/ dir and then proceed to remove the world execute bit on /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin. (Leave /lib, /usr/lib, etc. alone -- copying in the libraries this user will need is doubtless a lot of work.)
Mandatory access controls
I'll explain this using the AppArmor system; I've worked on AppArmor for over a decade, and it is the system I know best. There are more choices: TOMOYO, SMACK, and SELinux are all excellent tools. AppArmor and TOMOYO work on the idea that you confine access to pathnames. SMACK and SELinux work on the idea that every object on the system is assigned a label and the policy specifies which labels (on processes) can read, write, execute, etc. labels (on data or other processes). If you wanted to enforce a comprehensive Open, Classified, Secret, Top Secret style of protection, SMACK or SELinux would be the better tools. If you want to confine some programs to some files, AppArmor or TOMOYO would be the better tools.
AppArmor should come ready-to-use on most Ubuntu, SUSE, PLD, Annvix, Mandriva, and Pardus distributions.
The AppArmor system confines processes and controls how processes can move from domain to domain when the processes execute new programs. Domains are usually assigned by program.
The easiest way to get started is to copy /bin/bash to /bin/jail_bash (or some other name not in /etc/shells), set the shell for the user in /etc/passwd (chsh(1) can make this easy), and create an AppArmor profile for /bin/jail_bash that allows only the actions you want to allow. If we confine the process correctly, then the user cannot escape the profile we make for them.
Add a new sudoers(5) entry for this user for the sudo stop tomcat, sudo start tomcat, sudo restart tomcat, sudo status tomcat -- or whichever commands this user will need to execute to manage the tomcat service. See visudo(8) for details on editing the sudo(8) config file.
In one terminal, run aa-genprof jail_bash. In another terminal, log in as the user (or otherwise run /bin/jail_bash) and begin doing tasks that you want to allow the person to do. We'll use what you do as training material to build a profile iteratively. You might be interested to watch /var/log/syslog or /var/log/audit/audit.log (if you have the auditd package installed) to see what operations AppArmor notices your program doing. Don't do too much at once -- just a few new things per iteration.
In the aa-genprof terminal, answer the questions as they come up. Allow what needs to be allowed. Deny what ought to be denied. When you are asked about execution privileges, prefer inherit or child over profile. (The profile option will influence every one else on the system. Inherit or child will only influence executions from whatever profile you're currently working on improving. Child breaks apart privileges into smaller pieces, while inherit keeps permissions in larger profiles. Prefer inherit for this case.)
Once you get to questions about executing tomcat, use the unconfined execute privilege. This is dangerous -- if a bug in the way tomcat is started allows people to start unconfined shells, then this can be used to break out of the jail. You could confine tomcat (and this is even a good idea -- tomcat isn't perfect) to prevent this from being an escape route, but that is probably not necessary right away.
AppArmor is designed to make it easy to grow the profiles on a system over time. AppArmor isn't applicable to all security situations, but we deployed scenarios very similar to this at the DEF CON Capture-the-flag hacking contest with excellent results. We had to allow fellow attackers root (and ephemeral user accounts) access to the machine via telnet, as well as POP3, SMTP, HTTP+CGI, and FTP.
Be sure to hand-inspect the profiles in /etc/apparmor.d/ before allowing your user to log in. You can fix anything you want with a plain text editor; run /etc/init.d/apparmor restart to reload all profiles (and unload the profiles you might remove).
It's handy to keep an unconfined root sash(1) shell open when you're first learning how to configure AppArmor. If you ignore the warning about programs that shouldn't have their own profile, it might be difficult to get back into your own system. (Don't forget about booting with init=/bin/sh in the worst of situations.)
You can easily create a very restricted environment by starting bash in restricted mode. Set the user's shell to rbash instead of bash, and that will put it into restricted mode.
http://www.gnu.org/s/bash/manual/html_node/The-Restricted-Shell.html
There's a chance that rbash will be too restrictive for your needs. Among other things, the restricted environment forbids changing directories. But take a look at it and see if it's sufficient for your needs.
I have a bunch of programs which use IPC Semaphores to interact (semget).
One of the programs is an Apache module, which runs in (some sort of) restricted SELinux context (which I don't understand too well).
The module is capable of interacting with any regular files correctly, if of-course the files have their SELinux security context set appropriately.
However - when my (Module) goes to access the IPC Semaphore, the semget call fails with a EPERM. When SELinux is turned off, I don't get this error.
So - there is obviously something I need to do to set some sort of SELinux security context or something on the Semaphore for this to work. If it was a regular file, I could just call "chcon" on it. Since it's a System-V IPC Semaphore, I can't do that.
What can I do to make this work??
The basic steps to get SELinux working with the changes you need are:
Enable permissive mode
Capture denials
Add a new policy module or modify an existing policy module
Enable enforcing mode and test
Exactly how to do these steps depends on what Linux distribution you are using; here are references for CentOS, Debian, Gentoo, RedHat and Ubuntu. You can also find SELinux information from NSA. The best documentation I found is from Gentoo: step 1, step 2, step 3, step 4.
As #smassey noted, you most probably need to modify some IPC permission.
SELinux has persmission setting for more than just regular files, but also device and special files.
http://seedit.sourceforge.net/doc/access_vectors/access_vectors.html#SECTION00044000000000000000 is what you're looking for. Give read/write/etc permissions to the "sem" object.
Cheers
Gentoo has a feature in portage, that prevents and logs writes outside of the build and packaging directories.
Checkinstall is able to monitor writes, and package up all the generated files after completion.
Autotools have the DESTDIR macro that enables you to usually direct most of the filesystem activity to an alternate location.
How can I do this myself with the
safety of the Gentoo sandboxing
method?
Can I use SELinux, rlimit, or
some other resource limiting API?
What APIs are available do this from
C, Python?
Update0
The mechanism used will not require root privileges or any involved/persistent system modification. This rules out creating users and using chroot().
Please link to the documentation for APIs that you mention, for some reason they're exceptionally difficult to find.
Update1
This is to prevent accidents. I'm not worried about malicious code, only the poorly written variety.
The way Debian handles this sort of problem is to not run the installation code as root in the first place. Package build scripts are run as a normal user, and install scripts are run using fakeroot - this LD_PRELOAD library redirects permission-checking calls to make it look like the installer is actually running as root, so the resulting file ownership and permissions are right (ie, if you run /usr/bin/install from within the fakeroot environment, further stats from within the environment show proper root ownership), but in fact the installer is run as an ordinary user.
Builds are also, in some cases (primarily for development), done in chroots using eg pbuilder - this is likely easier on a binary distribution however, as each build using pbuilder reinstalls all dependencies beyond the base system, acting as a test that all necessary dependencies are specified (this is the primary reason for using a chroot; not for protection against accidental installs)
One approach is to virtualize a process, similar to how wine does it, and reinterpret file paths. That's rather heavy duty to implement though.
A more elegant approach is to use the chroot() system call which sets a subtree of the filesystem as a process's root directory. Create a virtual subtree, including /bin, /tmp, /usr, /etc as you want the process to see them, call chroot with the virtual tree, then exec the target executable. I can't recall if it is possible to have symbolic links within the tree reference files outside, but I don't think so. But certainly everything needed could be copied into the sandbox, and then when it is done, check for changes against the originals.
Maybe get the sandbox safety with regular user permissions? So the process running the show has specific access to specific directories.
chroot would be an option but I can't figure out how to track these tries to write outside the root.
Another idea would be along the lines of intercepting system calls. I don't know much about this but strace is a start, try running a program through it and check if you see something you like.
edit:
is using kernel modules an option? because you could replace the write system call with your own so you could prevent whatever you needed and also log it.
It sounds a bit like what you are describing is containers. Once you've got the container infrastructure set up, it's pretty cheap to create containers, and they're quite secure.
There are two methods to do this. One is to use LD_PRELOAD to hook library calls that result in syscalls, such as those in libc, and call dlsym/dlopen. This will not allow you to directly hook syscalls.
The second method, which allows hooking syscalls, is to run your executable under ptrace, which provides options to stop and examine syscalls when they occur. This can be set up programmatically to sandbox calls to restricted areas of the filesystem, among other things.
LD_PRELOAD can not intercept syscalls, but only libcalls?
Dynamic linker tricks: Using LD_PRELOAD to cheat, inject features and investigate programs
Write Yourself an Strace in 70 Lines of Code