[PATCH v2 1/5] fs: Add support for an O_MAYEXEC flag on sys_open()

[Andy Lutomirski]

> On Sep 6, 2019, at 1:51 PM, Jeff Layton <jlayton at kernel.org> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 2019-09-06 at 13:06 -0700, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
>
>> I’m not at all convinced that the kernel needs to distinguish all these, but at least upgradability should be its own thing IMO.
>
> Good point. Upgradability is definitely orthogonal, though the idea
> there is to alter the default behavior. If the default is NOEXEC then
> UPGRADE_EXEC would make sense.
>
> In any case, I was mostly thinking about the middle two in your list
> above. After more careful reading of the patches, I now get get that
> Mickaël is more interested in the first, and that's really a different
> sort of use-case.
>
> Most opens never result in the fd being fed to fexecve or mmapped with
> PROT_EXEC, so having userland explicitly opt-in to allowing that during
> the open sounds like a reasonable thing to do.
>
> But I get that preventing execution via script interpreters of files
> that are not executable might be something nice to have.
>
> Perhaps we need two flags for openat2?
>
> OA2_MAYEXEC : test that permissions allow execution and that the file
> doesn't reside on a noexec mount before allowing the open
>
> OA2_EXECABLE : only allow fexecve or mmapping with PROT_EXEC if the fd
> was opened with this
>
>
>

We could go one step farther and have three masks: check_perms,
fd_perms, and upgrade_perms.  check_perms says “fail if I don’t have
these perms”.  fd_perms is the permissions on the returned fd, and
upgrade_perms is the upgrade mask.  (fd_perms  & ~check_perms) != 0 is
an error.  This makes it possible to say "I want to make sure the file
is writable, but I don't actually want to write to it", which could
plausibly be useful.

I would argue that these things should have new, sane bits, e.g.
FILE_READ, FILE_WRITE, and FILE_EXECUTE (or maybe FILE_MAP_EXEC and
FILE_EXECVE).  And maybe there should be at least 16 bits for each
mask reserved.  Windows has a lot more mode bits than Linux, and it's
not entirely nuts.  We do *not* need any direct equivalent of O_RDWR
for openat2().

--Andy