Credentials not fully initialized before bprm_check LSM hook

Roberto Sassu roberto.sassu at huaweicloud.com
Thu Apr 10 11:47:07 UTC 2025


Hi everyone

recently I discovered a problem in the implementation of our IMA
bprm_check hook, in particular when the policy is matched against the
bprm credentials (to be committed later during execve().

Before commit 56305aa9b6fab ("exec: Compute file based creds only
once"), bprm_fill_uid() was called in prepare_binprm() and filled the
euid/egid before calling security_bprm_check(), which in turns calls
IMA.

After that commit, bprm_fill_uid() was moved to begin_new_exec(), which
is when the last interpreter is found.

The consequence is that IMA still sees the not yet ready credentials
and an IMA rule like:

measure func=CREDS_CHECK euid=0

will not be matched for sudo-like applications.

It does work however with SELinux, because it computes the transition
before IMA in the bprm_creds_for_exec hook.

Since IMA needs to be involved for each execution in the chain of
interpreters, we cannot move to the bprm_creds_from_file hook.

How do we solve this problem? The commit mentioned that it is an
optimization, so probably would not be too hard to partially revert it
(and keeping what is good).

Thanks

Roberto




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