[PATCH v8 00/12] Introduce CAP_PERFMON to secure system performance monitoring and observability

[Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo]

Em Thu, Apr 02, 2020 at 11:42:05AM +0300, Alexey Budankov escreveu:
> This patch set introduces CAP_PERFMON capability designed to secure
> system performance monitoring and observability operations so that
> CAP_PERFMON would assist CAP_SYS_ADMIN capability in its governing role
> for performance monitoring and observability subsystems of the kernel.

So, what am I doing wrong?

[perf at five ~]$ type perf
perf is hashed (/home/perf/bin/perf)
[perf at five ~]$
[perf at five ~]$ ls -lahF /home/perf/bin/perf
-rwxr-x---. 1 root perf_users 24M Apr  7 10:34 /home/perf/bin/perf*
[perf at five ~]$
[perf at five ~]$ getcap /home/perf/bin/perf
[perf at five ~]$ perf top --stdio
Error:
You may not have permission to collect system-wide stats.

Consider tweaking /proc/sys/kernel/perf_event_paranoid,
which controls use of the performance events system by
unprivileged users (without CAP_PERFMON or CAP_SYS_ADMIN).

The current value is 2:

  -1: Allow use of (almost) all events by all users
      Ignore mlock limit after perf_event_mlock_kb without CAP_IPC_LOCK
>= 0: Disallow ftrace function tracepoint by users without CAP_PERFMON or CAP_SYS_ADMIN
      Disallow raw tracepoint access by users without CAP_SYS_PERFMON or CAP_SYS_ADMIN
>= 1: Disallow CPU event access by users without CAP_PERFMON or CAP_SYS_ADMIN
>= 2: Disallow kernel profiling by users without CAP_PERFMON or CAP_SYS_ADMIN

To make this setting permanent, edit /etc/sysctl.conf too, e.g.:

	kernel.perf_event_paranoid = -1

[perf at five ~]$

Ok, the message says I  need to have CAP_PERFMON, lets do it, using an
unpatched libcap that doesn't know about it but we can use 38,
CAP_PERFMON value instead, and I tested this with a patched libcap as
well, same results:

As root:

[root at five bin]# setcap "38,cap_sys_ptrace,cap_syslog=ep" perf
[root at five bin]#

Back to the 'perf' user in the 'perf_users' group, ok, so now 'perf
record -a' works for system wide sampling of cycles:u, i.e. only
userspace samples, but 'perf top' is failing:

[perf at five ~]$ type perf
perf is hashed (/home/perf/bin/perf)
[perf at five ~]$ getcap /home/perf/bin/perf
/home/perf/bin/perf = cap_sys_ptrace,cap_syslog,38+ep
[perf at five ~]$ groups
perf perf_users
[perf at five ~]$ id
uid=1002(perf) gid=1002(perf) groups=1002(perf),1003(perf_users) context=unconfined_u:unconfined_r:unconfined_t:s0-s0:c0.c1023
[perf at five ~]$ perf top --stdio
Error:
Failed to mmap with 1 (Operation not permitted)
[perf at five ~]$ perf record -a
^C[ perf record: Woken up 1 times to write data ]
[ perf record: Captured and wrote 1.177 MB perf.data (1552 samples) ]

[perf at five ~]$ perf evlist
cycles:u
[perf at five ~]$

- Arnaldo