[libvirt] unable to set security context (NFSv4 problem?)

Daniel P. Berrange berrange at redhat.com
Thu Apr 22 09:41:38 UTC 2010


On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 08:43:37AM +0200, Harald Dunkel wrote:
> On 04/21/10 20:24, Spencer Shimko wrote:
> > Harald Dunkel wrote:
> >>
> >> Do you think it would be possible to introduce a configure
> >> option '--with-dac=no'?
> > 
> > I think that would be a little misleading ;)  It sounds like part of the
> > problem was that the error message wasn't clearly conveying the reason
> > for the problem.  It wasn't an SELinux security context that was causing
> > issues, it was DAC user/group.  I just submitted a patch to clarify the
> > error message to reference user/group instead of "security context."
> > 
> 
> The error message was just an indication that there is something
> fishy. All the NFS clients in my net have different UIDs and GIDs
> for the local system accounts, esp. for libvirt and kvm. Sorry to
> say, but the problem is not solved yet.

This is unfixably broken then. NFS security relies on all clients using
the same UID/GID <-> name mappings.

> Questions:
> 
> Why should libvirt have the privilege to change UID and GID of a
> disk image file on an NFS server? Usually this file is -rw-------
> for root. Doesn't the chown() to a UID != 0 weaken the security?

QEMU itself runs as a 'qemu' user & group ID. If the disk image file
is root:root -rw-------, then QEMU won't be able to read/write the
image. libvirt changes the ownership to match that required for QEMU
to access the disks configured in its XML. This approach increases
security, because we know that QEMU will not be able to write to any
files except those which have explicitly had their ownership set to
'qemu:qemu'.

Regards,
Daniel
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