Christian Brauner <brauner@kernel.org> says:
Currently, it isn't possible to change the idmapping of an idmapped
mount. This is becoming an obstacle for various use-cases.
/* idmapped home directories with systemd-homed */
On newer systems /home is can be an idmapped mount such that each file
on disk is owned by 65536 and a subfolder exists for foreign id ranges
such as containers. For example, a home directory might look like this
(using an arbitrary folder as an example):
user1@localhost:~/data/mount-idmapped$ ls -al /data/
total 16
drwxrwxrwx 1 65536 65536 36 Jan 27 12:15 .
drwxrwxr-x 1 root root 184 Jan 27 12:06 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 65536 65536 0 Jan 27 12:07 aaa
-rw-r--r-- 1 65536 65536 0 Jan 27 12:07 bbb
-rw-r--r-- 1 65536 65536 0 Jan 27 12:07 cc
drwxr-xr-x 1 2147352576 2147352576 0 Jan 27 19:06 containers
When logging in home is mounted as an idmapped mount with the following
idmappings:
65536:$(id -u):1 // uid mapping
65536:$(id -g):1 // gid mapping
2147352576:2147352576:65536 // uid mapping
2147352576:2147352576:65536 // gid mapping
So for a user with uid/gid 1000 an idmapped /home would like like this:
user1@localhost:~/data/mount-idmapped$ ls -aln /mnt/
total 16
drwxrwxrwx 1 1000 1000 36 Jan 27 12:15 .
drwxrwxr-x 1 0 0 184 Jan 27 12:06 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 1000 1000 0 Jan 27 12:07 aaa
-rw-r--r-- 1 1000 1000 0 Jan 27 12:07 bbb
-rw-r--r-- 1 1000 1000 0 Jan 27 12:07 cc
drwxr-xr-x 1 2147352576 2147352576 0 Jan 27 19:06 containers
In other words, 65536 is mapped to the user's uid/gid and the range
2147352576 up to 2147352576 + 65536 is an identity mapping for
containers.
When a container is started a transient uid/gid range is allocated
outside of both mappings of the idmapped mount. For example, the
container might get the idmapping:
$ cat /proc/1742611/uid_map
0 537985024 65536
This container will be allowed to write to disk within the allocated
foreign id range 2147352576 to 2147352576 + 65536. To do this an
idmapped mount must be created from an already idmapped mount such that:
- The mappings for the user's uid/gid must be dropped, i.e., the
following mappings are removed:
65536:$(id -u):1 // uid mapping
65536:$(id -g):1 // gid mapping
- A mapping for the transient uid/gid range to the foreign uid/gid range
is added:
2147352576:537985024:65536
In combination this will mean that the container will write to disk
within the foreign id range 2147352576 to 2147352576 + 65536.
/* nested containers */
When the outer container makes use of idmapped mounts it isn't posssible
to create an idmapped mount for the inner container with a differen
idmapping from the outer container's idmapped mount.
There are other usecases and the two above just serve as an illustration
of the problem.
This patchset makes it possible to create a new idmapped mount from an
already idmapped mount. It aims to adhere to current performance
constraints and requirements:
- Idmapped mounts aim to have near zero performance implications for
path lookup. That is why no refernce counting, locking or any other
mechanism can be required that would impact performance.
This works be ensuring that a regular mount transitions to an idmapped
mount once going from a static nop_mnt_idmap mapping to a non-static
idmapping.
- The idmapping of a mount change anymore for the lifetime of the mount
afterwards. This not just avoids UAF issues it also avoids pitfalls
such as generating non-matching uid/gid values.
Changing idmappings could be solved by:
- Idmappings could simply be reference counted (above the simple
reference count when sharing them across multiple mounts).
This would require pairing mnt_idmap_get() with mnt_idmap_put() which
would end up being sprinkled everywhere into the VFS and some
filesystems that access idmappings directly.
It wouldn't just be quite ugly and introduce new complexity it would
have a noticeable performance impact.
- Idmappings could gain RCU protection. This would help the LOOKUP_RCU
case and avoids taking reference counts under RCU.
When not under LOOKUP_RCU reference counts need to be acquired on each
idmapping. This would require pairing mnt_idmap_get() with
mnt_idmap_put() which would end up being sprinkled everywhere into the
VFS and some filesystems that access idmappings directly.
This would have the same downsides as mentioned earlier.
- The earlier solutions work by updating the mnt->mnt_idmap pointer with
the new idmapping. Instead of this it would be possible to change the
idmapping itself to avoid UAF issues.
To do this a sequence counter would have to be added to struct mount.
When retrieving the idmapping to generate uid/gid values the sequence
counter would need to be sampled and the generation of the uid/gid
would spin until the update of the idmap is finished.
This has problems as well but the biggest issue will be that this can
lead to inconsistent permission checking and inconsistent uid/gid
pairs even more than this is already possible today. Specifically,
during creation it could happen that:
idmap = mnt_idmap(mnt);
inode_permission(idmap, ...);
may_create(idmap);
// create file with uid/gid based on @idmap
in between the permission checking and the generation of the uid/gid
value the idmapping could change leading to the permission checking
and uid/gid value that is actually used to create a file on disk being
out of sync.
Similarly if two values are generated like:
idmap = mnt_idmap(mnt)
vfsgid = make_vfsgid(idmap);
// idmapping gets update concurrently
vfsuid = make_vfsuid(idmap);
@vfsgid and @vfsuid could be out of sync if the idmapping was changed
in between. The generation of vfsgid/vfsuid could span a lot of
codelines so to guard against this a sequence count would have to be
passed around.
The performance impact of this solutio are less clear but very likely
not zero.
- Using SRCU similar to fanotify that can sleep. I find that not just
ugly but it would have memory consumption implications and is overall
pretty ugly.
/* solution */
So, to avoid all of these pitfalls creating an idmapped mount from an
already idmapped mount will be done atomically, i.e., a new detached
mount is created and a new set of mount properties applied to it without
it ever having been exposed to userspace at all.
This can be done in two ways. A new flag to open_tree() is added
OPEN_TREE_CLEAR_IDMAP that clears the old idmapping and returns a mount
that isn't idmapped. And then it is possible to set mount attributes on
it again including creation of an idmapped mount.
This has the consequence that a file descriptor must exist in userspace
that doesn't have any idmapping applied and it will thus never work in
unpriviledged scenarios. As a container would be able to remove the
idmapping of the mount it has been given. That should be avoided.
Instead, we add open_tree_attr() which works just like open_tree() but
takes an optional struct mount_attr parameter. This is useful beyond
idmappings as it fills a gap where a mount never exists in userspace
without the necessary mount properties applied.
This is particularly useful for mount options such as
MOUNT_ATTR_{RDONLY,NOSUID,NODEV,NOEXEC}.
To create a new idmapped mount the following works:
// Create a first idmapped mount
struct mount_attr attr = {
.attr_set = MOUNT_ATTR_IDMAP
.userns_fd = fd_userns
};
fd_tree = open_tree(-EBADF, "/", OPEN_TREE_CLONE, &attr, sizeof(attr));
move_mount(fd_tree, "", -EBADF, "/mnt", MOVE_MOUNT_F_EMPTY_PATH);
// Create a second idmapped mount from the first idmapped mount
attr.attr_set = MOUNT_ATTR_IDMAP;
attr.userns_fd = fd_userns2;
fd_tree2 = open_tree(-EBADF, "/mnt", OPEN_TREE_CLONE, &attr, sizeof(attr));
// Create a second non-idmapped mount from the first idmapped mount:
memset(&attr, 0, sizeof(attr));
attr.attr_clr = MOUNT_ATTR_IDMAP;
fd_tree2 = open_tree(-EBADF, "/mnt", OPEN_TREE_CLONE, &attr, sizeof(attr));
* patches from https://lore.kernel.org/r/20250128-work-mnt_idmap-update-v2-v1-0-c25feb0d2eb3@kernel.org:
fs: allow changing idmappings
fs: add kflags member to struct mount_kattr
fs: add open_tree_attr()
fs: add copy_mount_setattr() helper
fs: add vfs_open_tree() helper
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20250128-work-mnt_idmap-update-v2-v1-0-c25feb0d2eb3@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <brauner@kernel.org>
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