[libvirt] RFC: stop clearing QEMU emulator capabilities

Laine Stump laine at laine.org
Fri Nov 29 03:12:16 UTC 2019


On 11/28/19 8:16 AM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 28, 2019 at 01:04:00PM +0000, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
>> We have an RFE from libguestfs to provide a way to run as root
>> *with* capabilities. I looked integrating this into the DAC security
>> manager as a new flag in the security label, but then I started
>> thinking about the whole idea of clearing capabilities
>>
>>    https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1045039
>>
>> Pretty much forever we have explicitly cleared QEMU emulator
>> capabilities when starting it.
>>
>> When QEMU uid/gid is set to non-root this is pointless as if we just
>> used a regular setuid/setgid call, the process will have all its
>> capabilities cleared anyway by the kernel.
>>
>> When QEMU uid/gid is set to root, this is almost (always?) never
>> what people actually want. People make QEMU run as root in order
>> to access some privileged resource that libvirt doesn't support
>> yet and this often requires capabilities. As a result they have
>> to go find the qemu.conf param to turn this off. This is not
>> viable for libguestfs - they want to control everything via thue
>> XML security label to request running as root regardless of the
>> qemu.conf settings for user/group.
>>
>> Clearing capabilities was implemented originally because there
>> was a proposal in Fedora to change permissions such that root,
>> with no capabilities would not be able to compromise the system.
>> ie a locked down root account. This never went anywhere though,
>> and as a result clearing capabilities when running as root does
>> not really get us any security benefit AFAICT. The root user
>> can just do something like create a cronjob, which will then
>> faithfully be run with full capabilities, trivially bypassing
>> the restriction we place.
>>
>> IOW, our clearing of capabilities is both useless from a security
>> POV, and breaks valid use cases when people need to run as root.
>>
>> I'm  thinking we should just rip out the code which clears capabilities
>> and allow default loggic to run
>>
>>   - If uid/gid is non-root, then no capabilities are present
>>   - If uid/gid is root, then full capabilities are present
> All seems reasonable to me ...


+1. I wasn't aware of the history behind it, but that all makes sense.





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