Re: SECCOMP_RET_USER_NOTIF: listener improvements

[Christian Brauner <christian@brauner.io>]

On Wed, Apr 24, 2019 at 05:23:05PM +0200, Christian Brauner wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 24, 2019 at 09:20:01AM -0600, Tycho Andersen wrote:
> > On Wed, Apr 24, 2019 at 05:04:26PM +0200, Christian Brauner wrote:
> > > Hey everyone,
> > > 
> > > So I was working on making use of the seccomp listener stuff and I
> > > stumbled upon a problem. Imagine a scenario where:
> > > 
> > > 1. Task T1 installs Filter F1 and gets and listener fd for that filter FD1
> > > 2. T1 sends FD1 via SCM_RIGHTS to task T2
> > >    T2 now holds a reference to the same underlying struct file as FD1 via FD2
> > > 3. T2 registers FD2 in an event loop and starts listening for events
> > > 4. T1 exits and wipes FD1
> > > 
> > > Now, T2 still holds a reference to the filter via FD2 which references
> > > the same underlying file as FD1 which has the seccomp filter stashed in
> > > private_data.
> > > So T2 will never get notified that the filter is essentially unused and
> > > doesn't know when to exit, i.e. it has no way of telling when T1 and all
> > > of its children using the same filter are gone.
> > > 
> > > I think we should have a way to do this
> > 
> > Since the only way we ever allow creating a struct file * that points
> > to a struct seccomp_filter *, if there is a notifier attached, the
> > number of tasks still being monitored by a particular filter should be
> > filter->usage - 1 (assuming there is a notifier attached). So we could
> > augment __put_seccomp_filter() to check for this and send out a
> > message with a SECCOMP_NOTIF_FLAG_DEAD flag or something.
> > 
> > > *or* alternatively have a way to attach a process to an existing
> > > filter.
> > 
> > I also think this wouldn't be too hard, since the struct file * has a
> > reference to the filter. So I guess the question is: which of these
> > makes more sense?
> 
> Or we do both... But overall I'm very much in favor of the option to

The reason why I say both is that you might not always want to join an
filter and also you still want a way to hand-off listener fds. My main
scenario is a single watcher that watches listener fds from multiple
processes each potentially with a different filter.

> attach a task to an existing filter. Re-creating a seccomp context is
> extremely brittle and error-prone. This would take a way a major pain
> point.
> 
> Christian