Messages in this thread |  | | Subject | Re: [PATCH] ioctl_tty.2: add TIOCGPTPEER documentation | From | Aleksa Sarai <> | Date | Thu, 17 Aug 2017 02:54:03 +1000 |
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> A couple of things to note on the bigger picture. > > The glibc library on all distributions has been changed to not have a > setuid binary pt_chown, that uses ptsname. This was the primary fix > for the security issue. > > The behavior of opening /dev/ptmx has been changed to perform a path > lookup relative to the location of /dev/ptmx of ./pts/ptmx and open > it it is a devpts filesystem and to fail otherwise. This further > makes it hard to confuse userspace this way as /dev/ptmx always > corresponds to /dev/pts/ptmx. Even in chroots and in other mount > namespaces.
I have a feeling that there might be a way to trick glibc if you use FUSE, but I haven't actually tried to create a PoC for it. Fair point though.
> That makes TIOCGPTPEER a very nice addition, but not something people > have to scramble to use to ensure their system is secure. As a hostile > environment now has to work very hard to confuse the existing mechanisms.
There are usecases where you simply need TIOCGPTPEER, and no other userspace alternative will do, but maybe if we modified the paragraph to read (as suggested):
Security-conscious programs interacting with namespaces may wish to use this operation rather than open(2) with the pathname returned by ptsname(3).
This would clarify that there are usecases where you need this particular feature, without saying causing people to panic over inaccurate claims of glibc being broken. Does that sound better?
-- Aleksa Sarai Software Engineer (Containers) SUSE Linux GmbH https://www.cyphar.com/
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