Hundreds of null PATH records for *init_module syscall audit logs

[Richard Guy Briggs]

Sorry, I forgot to include Cc: in this cover letter for context to the 4
alt patches.

On 2017-02-28 22:15, Richard Guy Briggs wrote:
> The background to this is:
> 	https://github.com/linux-audit/audit-kernel/issues/8
> 
> In short, audit SYSCALL records for *init_module were occasionally
> accompanied by hundreds to thousands of null PATH records.
> 
> I chatted with Al Viro and Eric Paris about this Friday afternoon and
> they seemed to vaguely recall this issue and didn't have any solid
> recommendations as to what was the right thing to do (other than the
> same suggestion from both that I won't print here).
> 
> It was reproducible on a number of vintages of distributions with
> default kernels, but triggering on very few of the many modules loaded
> at boot time.  It was reproduced with fs-nfs4 and nfsv4 modules on
> tracefs, but there are reports of it also happening with debugfs.  It
> was triggering only in __audit_inode_child with a parent that was not
> found in the task context's audit names_list.
> 
> I have four potential solutions listed in my order of preference and I'd
> like to get some feedback about which one would be the most acceptable.
> 
> 1 - In __audit_inode_child, return immedialy upon detecting TRACEFS and
>     DEBUGFS (and potentially other filesystems identified, via s_magic).
> 
> 2 - In __audit_inode_child, return after not finding the parent in that
>     task context's audit names_list.
> 
> 3 - In __audit_inode_child, mark the parent and its child as "hidden"
>     when the parent isn't found in that task context's audit names_list.
>     This will still result in an "items=" count that does not match the
>     number of accompanying PATH records for that SYSCALL record, which
>     may upset userspace tools but would still indicate suppressed
>     records.
> 
> 4 - In __audit_inode_child, when the parent isn't found, store the
>     child's dentry in the child's (new or not) audit_names structure
>     (properly refcounted with dget) and store the parent's dentry in its
>     newly created audit_names structure (via dget_parent), then if the
>     name isn't available at PATH record generation time, use that stored
>     value (with dentry_path_raw and released with dput)
> 
> Is there another more elegant solution that I've missed that catches
> things before they get anywhere near audit_inode_child (called from
> tracefs' notifiers)?
> 
> I'll thread onto this message tested patches for all four solutions.
> 
> 
> - RGB
> 
> --
> Richard Guy Briggs <rgb at redhat.com>
> Kernel Security Engineering, Base Operating Systems, Red Hat
> Remote, Ottawa, Canada
> Voice: +1.647.777.2635, Internal: (81) 32635

- RGB

--
Richard Guy Briggs <rgb at redhat.com>
Kernel Security Engineering, Base Operating Systems, Red Hat
Remote, Ottawa, Canada
Voice: +1.647.777.2635, Internal: (81) 32635