[PATCH RFC v3 08/10] net, pidfs, coredump: only allow coredumping tasks to connect to coredump socket

[Lennart Poettering]

On Mi, 07.05.25 13:51, Mickaël Salaün (mic at digikod.net) wrote:

> What if the task send a "fake" coredump and just after that really
> coredump?  There could be a race condition on the server side when
> checking the coredump property of this pidfd.
>
> Could we add a trusted header to the coredump payload that is always
> written by the kernel?  This would enable to read a trusted flag
> indicating if the following payload is a coredumped generated by the
> kernel or not.

With my systemd hat on I must say I don't really care if the coredump
is "authentic" or not. The coredump is untrusted data anyway, it needs
to be quarantined from systemd-coredump's PoV, there's no security
value in distinguishing if some random user's process was sent to the
handler because the user called raise(SIGSEGV) or because the user
called connect() to our socket. The process is under user control in
almost all ways anyways, they can rearrange its internals in almost
any way already, play any games they want. It's of very little value
if the receiving side can determine if the serialization of potential
complete garbage was written out by the kernel or by the process' own
code.

Moreover, in systemd-coredump we these days collect not only classic
ELF coredumps passed to us by the kernel, but also other forms of
crashes. For example if a Python program dies because of an uncaught
exception this is also passed to systemd-coredump, and treated the
same way in regards to metadata collection, logging, storage,
recycling and so on. Conceptually a python crash like that and a
process level crash are the same thing for us, we treat them the
same. And of course, Python crashes like this are *inherently* a
userspace concept, hence we explicitly want to accept them. Hence even
if we'd be able to distinguish "true" from "fake" coredumps we'd still
not care or change our behaviour much, because we are *as* *much*
interested in user-level crashes as in kernel handled crashes.

Lennart

--
Lennart Poettering, Berlin