BUG: Mount ignores mount options

Theodore Y. Ts'o tytso at mit.edu
Fri Aug 10 20:46:39 UTC 2018


On Fri, Aug 10, 2018 at 01:06:54PM -0700, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> If the same block device is visible, with rw access, in two different
> containers, I don't see any anything good can happen.

It's worse than that.  I've fixed a lot of bugs which cause the kernel
to crash, and a few that might be levered into a privilege escalationh
attack, when you mount a maliciously corrupted file system using ext4.
I'm told told the security researcher filed similar reports with the
XFS community, and he was told, "that's what metadata checksums are
for; go away".  Given how much time it takes to work with these
security researchers, I don't blame them.

But in light of that, I'd make a somewhat stronger statement.  If you
let an untrusted container mount arbitrary block devices where they
have rw acccess to the underlying block device, nothing good can
happen.  Period.  :-)

Which is why I don't think the lack of being able to reject
"conflicting mount options" is really all that important.  It
certainly shouldn't block the fsopen patch series.  #1, it's a problem
we have today, and #2, I'm really not all sure supporting bind mounts
via specifying block device was ever a good idea to begin with.  And
#3, while I've been fixing ext4 against security issues caused by
maliciously corrupted file system images, I'm still sure that allowing
untrusted containers access to mount *any* file system via a block
device for which they have r/w access is a Really Bad Idea.

> It seems to me that the current approach mostly involves crossing our fingers.

Agreed!

						- Ted



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