[Virtio-fs] [PATCH 0/2] virtiofsd: drop Linux capabilities(7)

[Vivek Goyal]

On Thu, Apr 16, 2020 at 05:49:05PM +0100, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
> virtiofsd doesn't need of all Linux capabilities(7) available to root.  Keep a
> whitelisted set of capabilities that we require.  This improves security in
> case virtiofsd is compromised by making it hard for an attacker to gain further
> access to the system.

Hi Stefan,

I just noticed that this patch set breaks overlayfs on top of virtiofs.

overlayfs sets "trusted.overlay.*" and xattrs in trusted domain
need CAP_SYS_ADMIN.

man xattr says.

   Trusted extended attributes
       Trusted  extended  attributes  are  visible and accessible only to pro‐
       cesses that have the  CAP_SYS_ADMIN  capability.   Attributes  in  this
       class are used to implement mechanisms in user space (i.e., outside the
       kernel) which keep information in extended attributes to which ordinary
       processes should not have access.

There is a chance that overlay moves away from trusted xattr in future.
But for now we need to make it work. This is an important use case for
kata docker in docker build.

May be we can add an option to virtiofsd say "--add-cap <capability>" and
ask user to pass in "--add-cap cap_sys_admin" if they need to run daemon
with this capaibility.

Thanks
Vivek

> 
> Stefan Hajnoczi (2):
>   virtiofsd: only retain file system capabilities
>   virtiofsd: drop all capabilities in the wait parent process
> 
>  tools/virtiofsd/passthrough_ll.c | 51 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>  1 file changed, 51 insertions(+)
> 
> -- 
> 2.25.1
> 
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