[PATCH RFC v2 00/13] IOMMUFD Generic interface

Daniel P. Berrangé berrange at redhat.com
Thu Sep 22 15:00:00 UTC 2022


On Thu, Sep 22, 2022 at 11:51:54AM -0300, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 22, 2022 at 03:49:02PM +0100, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 22, 2022 at 11:08:23AM -0300, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> > > On Thu, Sep 22, 2022 at 12:20:50PM +0100, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> > > > On Wed, Sep 21, 2022 at 03:44:24PM -0300, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> > > > > On Wed, Sep 21, 2022 at 12:06:49PM -0600, Alex Williamson wrote:
> > > > > > The issue is where we account these pinned pages, where accounting is
> > > > > > necessary such that a user cannot lock an arbitrary number of pages
> > > > > > into RAM to generate a DoS attack.  
> > > > > 
> > > > > It is worth pointing out that preventing a DOS attack doesn't actually
> > > > > work because a *task* limit is trivially bypassed by just spawning
> > > > > more tasks. So, as a security feature, this is already very
> > > > > questionable.
> > > > 
> > > > The malicious party on host VM hosts is generally the QEMU process.
> > > > QEMU is normally prevented from spawning more tasks, both by SELinux
> > > > controls and be the seccomp sandbox blocking clone() (except for
> > > > thread creation).  We need to constrain what any individual QEMU can
> > > > do to the host, and the per-task mem locking limits can do that.
> > > 
> > > Even with syscall limits simple things like execve (enabled eg for
> > > qemu self-upgrade) can corrupt the kernel task-based accounting to the
> > > point that the limits don't work.
> > 
> > Note, execve is currently blocked by default too by the default
> > seccomp sandbox used with libvirt, as well as by the SELinux
> > policy again.  self-upgrade isn't a feature that exists (yet).
> 
> That userspace has disabled half the kernel isn't an excuse for the
> kernel to be insecure by design :( This needs to be fixed to enable
> features we know are coming so..
> 
> What would libvirt land like to see given task based tracking cannot
> be fixed in the kernel?

There needs to be a mechanism to control individual VMs, whether by
task or by cgroup. User based limits are not suited to what we need
to achieve.

With regards,
Daniel
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