This adds the new getsockopt(2) option SO_PEERGROUPS on SOL_SOCKET to
retrieve the auxiliary groups of the remote peer. It is designed to
naturally extend SO_PEERCRED. That is, the underlying data is from the
same credentials. Regarding its syntax, it is based on SO_PEERSEC. That
is, if the provided buffer is too small, ERANGE is returned and @optlen
is updated. Otherwise, the information is copied, @optlen is set to the
actual size, and 0 is returned.
While SO_PEERCRED (and thus `struct ucred') already returns the primary
group, it lacks the auxiliary group vector. However, nearly all access
controls (including kernel side VFS and SYSVIPC, but also user-space
polkit, DBus, ...) consider the entire set of groups, rather than just
the primary group. But this is currently not possible with pure
SO_PEERCRED. Instead, user-space has to work around this and query the
system database for the auxiliary groups of a UID retrieved via
SO_PEERCRED.
Unfortunately, there is no race-free way to query the auxiliary groups
of the PID/UID retrieved via SO_PEERCRED. Hence, the current user-space
solution is to use getgrouplist(3p), which itself falls back to NSS and
whatever is configured in nsswitch.conf(3). This effectively checks
which groups we *would* assign to the user if it logged in *now*. On
normal systems it is as easy as reading /etc/group, but with NSS it can
resort to quering network databases (eg., LDAP), using IPC or network
communication.
Long story short: Whenever we want to use auxiliary groups for access
checks on IPC, we need further IPC to talk to the user/group databases,
rather than just relying on SO_PEERCRED and the incoming socket. This
is unfortunate, and might even result in dead-locks if the database
query uses the same IPC as the original request.
So far, those recursions / dead-locks have been avoided by using
primitive IPC for all crucial NSS modules. However, we want to avoid
re-inventing the wheel for each NSS module that might be involved in
user/group queries. Hence, we would preferably make DBus (and other IPC
that supports access-management based on groups) work without resorting
to the user/group database. This new SO_PEERGROUPS ioctl would allow us
to make dbus-daemon work without ever calling into NSS.
Cc: Michal Sekletar <msekleta@redhat.com>
Cc: Simon McVittie <simon.mcvittie@collabora.co.uk>
Reviewed-by: Tom Gundersen <teg@jklm.no>
Signed-off-by: David Herrmann <dh.herrmann@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
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