[oss-security] lockdown bypass on mainline kernel for loading unsigned modules

[Jason A. Donenfeld]

On 6/15/20, Jann Horn <jannh at google.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 6:24 PM John Haxby <john.haxby at oracle.com> wrote:
>> > On 15 Jun 2020, at 11:26, Jason A. Donenfeld <Jason at zx2c4.com> wrote:
>> > Yesterday, I found a lockdown bypass in Ubuntu 18.04's kernel using
>> > ACPI table tricks via the efi ssdt variable [1]. Today I found another
>> > one that's a bit easier to exploit and appears to be unpatched on
>> > mainline, using acpi_configfs to inject an ACPI table. The tricks are
>> > basically the same as the first one, but this one appears to be
>> > unpatched, at least on my test machine. Explanation is in the header
>> > of the PoC:
>> >
>> > https://git.zx2c4.com/american-unsigned-language/tree/american-unsigned-language-2.sh
>> >
>> > I need to get some sleep, but if nobody posts a patch in the
>> > meanwhile, I'll try to post a fix tomorrow.
>> >
>> > Jason
>> >
>> > [1] https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2020/06/14/1
>>
>>
>> This looks CVE-worthy.   Are you going to ask for a CVE for it?
>
> Does it really make sense to dole out CVEs for individual lockdown
> bypasses when various areas of the kernel (such as filesystems and
> BPF) don't see root->kernel privilege escalation issues as a problem?
> It's not like applying the fix for this one issue is going to make
> systems meaningfully safer.
>

Indeed, I'm more or less of the same mind: lockdown is kind of a
best-effort thing at the moment, and it'd be crazy to rely on it,
considering various bypasses and differing attitudes on the security
model from different subsystems. This acpi bypass is a bug, maybe, but
it doesn't feel like a "real" security bug, because I'm not sure why
this would be a feature somebody would want to lean on at this point
in time. I wrote a PoC for this one rather than others because it
seemed fun and technically interesting to poke around with acpi in
this way, not because it's particularly rare or something.