• David Herrmann's avatar
    shm: add sealing API · 40e041a2
    David Herrmann authored
    If two processes share a common memory region, they usually want some
    guarantees to allow safe access. This often includes:
      - one side cannot overwrite data while the other reads it
      - one side cannot shrink the buffer while the other accesses it
      - one side cannot grow the buffer beyond previously set boundaries
    
    If there is a trust-relationship between both parties, there is no need
    for policy enforcement.  However, if there's no trust relationship (eg.,
    for general-purpose IPC) sharing memory-regions is highly fragile and
    often not possible without local copies.  Look at the following two
    use-cases:
    
      1) A graphics client wants to share its rendering-buffer with a
         graphics-server. The memory-region is allocated by the client for
         read/write access and a second FD is passed to the server. While
         scanning out from the memory region, the server has no guarantee that
         the client doesn't shrink the buffer at any time, requiring rather
         cumbersome SIGBUS handling.
      2) A process wants to perform an RPC on another process. To avoid huge
         bandwidth consumption, zero-copy is preferred. After a message is
         assembled in-memory and a FD is passed to the remote side, both sides
         want to be sure that neither modifies this shared copy, anymore. The
         source may have put sensible data into the message without a separate
         copy and the target may want to parse the message inline, to avoid a
         local copy.
    
    While SIGBUS handling, POSIX mandatory locking and MAP_DENYWRITE provide
    ways to achieve most of this, the first one is unproportionally ugly to
    use in libraries and the latter two are broken/racy or even disabled due
    to denial of service attacks.
    
    This patch introduces the concept of SEALING.  If you seal a file, a
    specific set of operations is blocked on that file forever.  Unlike locks,
    seals can only be set, never removed.  Hence, once you verified a specific
    set of seals is set, you're guaranteed that no-one can perform the blocked
    operations on this file, anymore.
    
    An initial set of SEALS is introduced by this patch:
      - SHRINK: If SEAL_SHRINK is set, the file in question cannot be reduced
                in size. This affects ftruncate() and open(O_TRUNC).
      - GROW: If SEAL_GROW is set, the file in question cannot be increased
              in size. This affects ftruncate(), fallocate() and write().
      - WRITE: If SEAL_WRITE is set, no write operations (besides resizing)
               are possible. This affects fallocate(PUNCH_HOLE), mmap() and
               write().
      - SEAL: If SEAL_SEAL is set, no further seals can be added to a file.
              This basically prevents the F_ADD_SEAL operation on a file and
              can be set to prevent others from adding further seals that you
              don't want.
    
    The described use-cases can easily use these seals to provide safe use
    without any trust-relationship:
    
      1) The graphics server can verify that a passed file-descriptor has
         SEAL_SHRINK set. This allows safe scanout, while the client is
         allowed to increase buffer size for window-resizing on-the-fly.
         Concurrent writes are explicitly allowed.
      2) For general-purpose IPC, both processes can verify that SEAL_SHRINK,
         SEAL_GROW and SEAL_WRITE are set. This guarantees that neither
         process can modify the data while the other side parses it.
         Furthermore, it guarantees that even with writable FDs passed to the
         peer, it cannot increase the size to hit memory-limits of the source
         process (in case the file-storage is accounted to the source).
    
    The new API is an extension to fcntl(), adding two new commands:
      F_GET_SEALS: Return a bitset describing the seals on the file. This
                   can be called on any FD if the underlying file supports
                   sealing.
      F_ADD_SEALS: Change the seals of a given file. This requires WRITE
                   access to the file and F_SEAL_SEAL may not already be set.
                   Furthermore, the underlying file must support sealing and
                   there may not be any existing shared mapping of that file.
                   Otherwise, EBADF/EPERM is returned.
                   The given seals are _added_ to the existing set of seals
                   on the file. You cannot remove seals again.
    
    The fcntl() handler is currently specific to shmem and disabled on all
    files. A file needs to explicitly support sealing for this interface to
    work. A separate syscall is added in a follow-up, which creates files that
    support sealing. There is no intention to support this on other
    file-systems. Semantics are unclear for non-volatile files and we lack any
    use-case right now. Therefore, the implementation is specific to shmem.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarDavid Herrmann <dh.herrmann@gmail.com>
    Acked-by: default avatarHugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
    Cc: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
    Cc: Ryan Lortie <desrt@desrt.ca>
    Cc: Lennart Poettering <lennart@poettering.net>
    Cc: Daniel Mack <zonque@gmail.com>
    Cc: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    40e041a2
shmem.c 83.8 KB