[PATCH v3 00/12] ima: Fix rule parsing bugs and extend KEXEC_CMDLINE rule support

Mimi Zohar zohar at linux.ibm.com
Fri Jul 17 04:31:33 UTC 2020


On Thu, 2020-07-09 at 01:18 -0500, Tyler Hicks wrote:
> This series ultimately extends the supported IMA rule conditionals for
> the KEXEC_CMDLINE hook function. As of today, there's an imbalance in
> IMA language conditional support for KEXEC_CMDLINE rules in comparison
> to KEXEC_KERNEL_CHECK and KEXEC_INITRAMFS_CHECK rules. The KEXEC_CMDLINE
> rules do not support *any* conditionals so you cannot have a sequence of
> rules like this:
> 
>  dont_measure func=KEXEC_KERNEL_CHECK obj_type=foo_t
>  dont_measure func=KEXEC_INITRAMFS_CHECK obj_type=foo_t
>  dont_measure func=KEXEC_CMDLINE obj_type=foo_t
>  measure func=KEXEC_KERNEL_CHECK
>  measure func=KEXEC_INITRAMFS_CHECK
>  measure func=KEXEC_CMDLINE
> 
> Instead, KEXEC_CMDLINE rules can only be measured or not measured and
> there's no additional flexibility in today's implementation of the
> KEXEC_CMDLINE hook function.
> 
> With this series, the above sequence of rules becomes valid and any
> calls to kexec_file_load() with a kernel and initramfs inode type of
> foo_t will not be measured (that includes the kernel cmdline buffer)
> while all other objects given to a kexec_file_load() syscall will be
> measured. There's obviously not an inode directly associated with the
> kernel cmdline buffer but this patch series ties the inode based
> decision making for KEXEC_CMDLINE to the kernel's inode. I think this
> will be intuitive to policy authors.
> 
> While reading IMA code and preparing to make this change, I realized
> that the buffer based hook functions (KEXEC_CMDLINE and KEY_CHECK) are
> quite special in comparison to longer standing hook functions. These
> buffer based hook functions can only support measure actions and there
> are some restrictions on the conditionals that they support. However,
> the rule parser isn't enforcing any of those restrictions and IMA policy
> authors wouldn't have any immediate way of knowing that the policy that
> they wrote is invalid. For example, the sequence of rules above parses
> successfully in today's kernel but the
> "dont_measure func=KEXEC_CMDLINE ..." rule is incorrectly handled in
> ima_match_rules(). The dont_measure rule is *always* considered to be a
> match so, surprisingly, no KEXEC_CMDLINE measurements are made.
> 
> While making the rule parser more strict, I realized that the parser
> does not correctly free all of the allocated memory associated with an
> ima_rule_entry when going down some error paths. Invalid policy loaded
> by the policy administrator could result in small memory leaks.
> 
> I envision patches 1-7 going to stable. The series is ordered in a way
> that has all the fixes up front, followed by cleanups, followed by the
> feature patch. The breakdown of patches looks like so:
> 
>  Memory leak fixes: 1-3
>  Parser strictness fixes: 4-7
>  Code cleanups made possible by the fixes: 8-11
>  Extend KEXEC_CMDLINE rule support: 12

Thanks, Tyler.  This is a really nice patch set.  The patches are now
in the "next-integrity-testing" branch.

Mimi



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