On 2010-10-12 19.20, Jan Kiszka wrote:
> Am 12.10.2010 14:56, Anders Blomdell wrote:
>> On 2010-10-12 12.23, Anders Blomdell wrote:
>>> On 2010-10-12 11.25, Anders Blomdell wrote:
>>>> On 2010-10-11 18.58, Jan Kiszka wrote:
>>>>> Am 11.10.2010 18:49, Gilles Chanteperdrix wrote:
>>>>>> Jan Kiszka wrote:
>>>>>>> Am 11.10.2010 18:23, Gilles Chanteperdrix wrote:
>>>>>>>> Jan Kiszka wrote:
>>>>>>>>> enabling the Xenomai watchdog should provide a reasonably safe&secure
>>>>>>>>> environment.
>>>>>>>> AFAIK, the BIG FAT warning at the bottom of this page still applies. 
>>>>>>>> You
>>>>>>>> can make an environment with no hardware lockups, but secure, I do not
>>>>>>>> think so. We do not know how Xenomai APIs could be exploited for a
>>>>>>>> non-root user to become root.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> For sure, no one audited the interface for security so far. There is no
>>>>>>> hole in design that comes to my mind ATM, but I would be surprised as
>>>>>>> well if you couldn't develop any exploit for some bug or missing check.
>>>>>>> Still, there is a huge difference between giving anyone root access and
>>>>>>> confining Xenomai access this way.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I was just reacting to "reasonably secure". The experience proves that
>>>>>> if you do not do any particular effort for security, then your code is
>>>>>> not secure. Not even reasonably.
>>>>>
>>>>> This is no black-or-white domain, and I wouldn't say we spend no effort
>>>>> on security at all. We do have interest in making the userspace APIs
>>>>> robust which addresses security up to a certain level as well.
>>>>>
>>>>> What is still definitely not secure, though, is RTnet as it consequently
>>>>> lacks any kind of check on user-passed addresses. But that's not
>>>>> Xenomai's fault (rather mine).
>>>> If I understand manpages and code correctly, xenomai is insecure by design 
>>>> (not
>>>> a major problem here, I hope), but I had hoped to be able to avoid 
>>>> CAP_SYS_RAWIO
>>>> which I think is the biggest security problem (access to /proc/kcore IS 
>>>> scary),
>>>> but since CAP_SYS_NICE implies CAP_SYS_RAWIO via shadow.c:
>>>>     if (!capable(CAP_SYS_NICE) &&
>>>>         (xn_gid_arg == -1 || !in_group_p(xn_gid_arg)))
>>>>         return -EPERM;
>>>>
>>>>      wrap_raise_cap(CAP_SYS_NICE);
>>>>      wrap_raise_cap(CAP_IPC_LOCK);
>>>>      wrap_raise_cap(CAP_SYS_RAWIO);
>>>>
>>>> I will go for the group thing (simple and totally insecure) for now, and 
>>>> put
>>>> some more thought into it later on.
>>> Well, obviously this feature is somewhat broken:
>>>
>>>> testprog
>>> Xenomai: binding failed: Cannot allocate memory.
>>>
>>> This is what syslog says:
>>> Xenomai: testprog[2367] cannot map MAYDAY page
>>>
>>> Running as root works as it should.
>> CAP_DAC_OVERRIDE fixes this issue (and how safe is that :-( )
> 
> This is not a Xenomai issue but a system misconfiguration. Installing
> the Xenomai-provided udev scripts will fix it (ie. grant your Xenomai
> group access to /dev/rtheap).
http://www.xenomai.org/index.php/Non-root_RT needs to be fixed, since the
rtheap/rtpipe.rules assumes that the group is named xenomai.

> 
>>
>> How necessary are CAP_SYS_RAWIO and CAP_DAC_OVERRIDE [the two capabiltities i
>> think have the most severe security implications] when main has started 
>> running,
>> i.e. could I drop them after initialization and still do something useful?
> 
> In the absence of user space drivers, you should be able to live without
> CAP_SYS_RAWIO. Not sure, though, if there is a way to overcome
> CAP_SYS_RAWIO for user space TSC access on ARM as Gilles mentioned. But
> if that turns out to be the only remaining problem, making this
> capability optional (at least on !=ARM) should be no big deal IMHO.

OK, sounds like it's worth investigating further. I'm not after total security,
but trying to make it harder for students to unintentionally breaking the
[file-]system.

/Anders

-- 
Anders Blomdell                  Email: [email protected]
Department of Automatic Control
Lund University                  Phone:    +46 46 222 4625
P.O. Box 118                     Fax:      +46 46 138118
SE-221 00 Lund, Sweden

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