SMACK LSM checks wrong object label during ingress network traffic

[Lontke, Michael]

Hello Mr. Schaufler,

we observed the following behavior of the SMACK LSM kernel feature.

PROBLEM: SMACK LSM is checking the wrong label when receiving network
packets during high system load.

Full Descrpition of the Problem: During a test scenario involving high
system load (cpu, memory and io) in combination with ingress tcp
network traffic, SMACK is checking wrong object labels leading to
denied access for valid scenarios.
In below test scenario the label 'stresstest' is only used for the
application 'stress' but appears in SMACK audit logs as object together
with netlabels.

This issue initially appeared on hardware with kernel version 4.14.237
but was also being reproduced with qemu for kernel version 4.14.290 and
latest 6.0-rc2. The used rootfs was generated via buildroot version
2022.08-rc1.


KEYWORDS: smack, networking

KERNEL INFORMATION: Linux stable kernel

KERNEL VERSION: 4.14.237, 4.14.290, 6.0-rc2


KERNEL CONFIG: smack related kernel configuration

CONFIG_NETLABEL=y

CONFIG_SECURITY_NETWORK=y

CONFIG_SECURITY_SMACK=y

CONFIG_DEFAULT_SECURITY_SMACK=y

CONFIG_DEFAULT_SECURITY="smack"

CONFIG_CRC_CCITT=y

CONFIG_EXT4_FS_SECURITY=y

CONFIG_TMPFS_XATTR=y

CONFIG_SQUASHFS_XATTR=y


Steps to reproduce the issue:
On qemu:
* Setup qemu with network connection to the host via tap device.
* Add ip6host label via smackfs:

echo "<host-ipv6-addr> net_host" > /sys/fs/smackfs/ipv6host

* Add rule for allowed network traffic:

echo "tcp_test net_host w" > /sys/fs/smackfs/load2

* The following script was used for listening for packets on qemu:

cat << EOF > tcp_listen.sh
#!/bin/sh
while true;
do
    socat - TCP6-LISTEN:\$1,reuseaddr,fork > /dev/null & ps=\$!
    sleep 1
    kill -9 \$ps
done
EOF

* Start the script twice, one allowing, one denying traffic via SMACK:

echo tcp_test > /proc/self/attr/current && sh tcp_listen.sh 12345 2>&1
/dev/null &
echo tcp_test2 > /proc/self/attr/current && sh tcp_listen.sh 12346 2>&1
/dev/null &

* Start 'stress' to generate system load with 'stresstest' as SMACK
label:

echo stresstest > /proc/self/attr/current && stress -c 2 -i 4 -m 2 --
vm-bytes 64M &


On host:
* Generate random data to send via network:
 
dd if=/dev/urandom of=test/data bs=1M count=10

* Use the following script to continously send packets:

cat << EOF > packet_tcp.sh
#!/bin/sh
while true;
do
    cat data | nc <qemu-ipv6-addr> \$1
done
EOF

* Execute the script twice to address both receiving applications on
qemu:

bash packet_tcp.sh 12345 2>&1 > /dev/null &
bash packet_tcp.sh 12346 2>&1 > /dev/null &


Observing the problem:

After letting this run for ~5-10 mins only audit messages regarding the
label 'tcp_test2' are expected.
The issues can be seen, that also other labels are randomly appearing
in the logs (most commonly here 'stresstest', probably since it
occupies most of the cpu time):

journalctl | grep action=denied | grep -v tcp_test2


Example entry with kernel 6.0-rc2:
Aug 24 12:38:32 buildroot audit[609]: AVC lsm=SMACK fn=smk_ipv6_check
action=denied subject="net_host" object="stresstest" requested=w
pid=609 comm="stress" saddr=<host-ipv6-addr> dest=50714


If you are missing additional info please reach out to me.
Thank you in advance and best regards,

Michael Lontke