The tunable privilege levels were a retrofit to try and keep the malloc
tunable environment variables' behavior unchanged across security
boundaries. However, CVE-2023-4911 shows how tricky can be
tunable parsing in a security-sensitive environment.
Not only parsing, but the malloc tunable essentially changes some
semantics on setuid/setgid processes. Although it is not a direct
security issue, allowing users to change setuid/setgid semantics is not
a good security practice, and requires extra code and analysis to check
if each tunable is safe to use on all security boundaries.
It also means that security opt-in features, like aarch64 MTE, would
need to be explicit enabled by an administrator with a wrapper script
or with a possible future system-wide tunable setting.
Co-authored-by: Siddhesh Poyarekar <siddhesh@sourceware.org>
Reviewed-by: DJ Delorie <dj@redhat.com>
The TUNABLE_SET interface took a primitive C type argument, which
resulted in inconsistent type conversions internally due to incorrect
dereferencing of types, especialy on 32-bit architectures. This
change simplifies the TUNABLE setting logic along with the interfaces.
Now all numeric tunable values are stored as signed numbers in
tunable_num_t, which is intmax_t. All calls to set tunables cast the
input value to its primitive type and then to tunable_num_t for
storage. This relies on gcc-specific (although I suspect other
compilers woul also do the same) unsigned to signed integer conversion
semantics, i.e. the bit pattern is conserved. The reverse conversion
is guaranteed by the standard.
The SXID_* tunable properties only influence processes that are
AT_SECURE, so make that a bit more explicit in the documentation and
comment.
Revisiting the code after a few years I managed to confuse myself, so
I imagine there could be others who may have incorrectly assumed like
I did that the SXID_ERASE tunables are not inherited by children of
non-AT_SECURE processes.
Reviewed-by: Florian Weimer <fweimer@redhat.com>
Some tunable values and their minimum/maximum values must be determinted
at run-time. Add TUNABLE_SET_WITH_BOUNDS and TUNABLE_SET_WITH_BOUNDS_FULL
to update tunable value together with minimum and maximum values.
__tunable_set_val is updated to set tunable value as well as min/max
values.
The glibc.tune namespace is vaguely named since it is a 'tunable', so
give it a more specific name that describes what it refers to. Rename
the tunable namespace to 'cpu' to more accurately reflect what it
encompasses. Also rename glibc.tune.cpu to glibc.cpu.name since
glibc.cpu.cpu is weird.
* NEWS: Mention the change.
* elf/dl-tunables.list: Rename tune namespace to cpu.
* sysdeps/powerpc/dl-tunables.list: Likewise.
* sysdeps/x86/dl-tunables.list: Likewise.
* sysdeps/aarch64/dl-tunables.list: Rename tune.cpu to
cpu.name.
* elf/dl-hwcaps.c (_dl_important_hwcaps): Adjust.
* elf/dl-hwcaps.h (GET_HWCAP_MASK): Likewise.
* manual/README.tunables: Likewise.
* manual/tunables.texi: Likewise.
* sysdeps/powerpc/cpu-features.c: Likewise.
* sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/aarch64/cpu-features.c
(init_cpu_features): Likewise.
* sysdeps/x86/cpu-features.c: Likewise.
* sysdeps/x86/cpu-features.h: Likewise.
* sysdeps/x86/cpu-tunables.c: Likewise.
* sysdeps/x86_64/Makefile: Likewise.
* sysdeps/x86/dl-cet.c: Likewise.
Reviewed-by: Carlos O'Donell <carlos@redhat.com>
