samples: show race-free pidfd metadata access
authorChristian Brauner <christian@brauner.io>
Sun, 7 Apr 2019 19:18:11 +0000 (21:18 +0200)
committerChristian Brauner <christian@brauner.io>
Tue, 7 May 2019 12:31:04 +0000 (14:31 +0200)
commit43c6afee48d4d866d5eb984d3a5dbbc7d9b4e7bf
tree19fa00ede54949757cea719765db5ec86fb89f2a
parent2151ad1b067275730de1b38c7257478cae47d29e
samples: show race-free pidfd metadata access

This is a sample program showing userspace how to get race-free access
to process metadata from a pidfd.  It is rather easy to do and userspace
can actually simply reuse code that currently parses a process's status
file in procfs.
The program can easily be extended into a generic helper suitable for
inclusion in a libc to make it even easier for userspace to gain metadata
access.

Since this came up in a discussion because this API is going to be used
in various service managers: A lot of programs will have a whitelist
seccomp filter that returns <some-errno> for all new syscalls.  This
means that programs might get confused if CLONE_PIDFD works but the
later pidfd_send_signal() syscall doesn't.  Hence, here's a ahead of
time check that pidfd_send_signal() is supported:

bool pidfd_send_signal_supported()
{
        int procfd = open("/proc/self", O_DIRECTORY | O_RDONLY | O_CLOEXEC);
        if (procfd < 0)
                return false;

        /*
         * A process is always allowed to signal itself so
         * pidfd_send_signal() should never fail this test. If it does
         * it must mean it is not available, blocked by an LSM, seccomp,
         * or other.
         */
        return pidfd_send_signal(procfd, 0, NULL, 0) == 0;
}

Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <christian@brauner.io>
Co-developed-by: Jann Horn <jannh@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Jann Horn <jannh@google.com>
Reviewed-by: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Cc: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Cc: "Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)" <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Cc: Andy Lutomirsky <luto@kernel.org>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Aleksa Sarai <cyphar@cyphar.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
samples/Makefile
samples/pidfd/Makefile [new file with mode: 0644]
samples/pidfd/pidfd-metadata.c [new file with mode: 0644]