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>
9c96c87d60