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Capsicum Object-Capabilities on Linux

STATUS: This project is no longer maintained, and is now out of date with the upstream Linux kernel. (However, Capsicum as a whole is still active as part of FreeBSD)

This repository holds the kernel code for the Linux version of the Capsicum security framework.

Topic Branches

This repository includes four (per-version) topic branches, which hold patchsets that apply cleanly on top of an upstream kernel version. These branches are frequently rebased, either because a new upstream release candidate has become available, or because a fix to Capsicum code has been folded into the patchset.

The capsicum-hooks-<ver> branch holds a patch set that can be applied on top of the specified upstream kernel version, in order to provide the core Capsicum object capability functionality. This patch set breaks the functionality down into individual chunks for ease of review and application; there are also several commits that include independent pieces of function that are potentially of interest on their own:

  • The first commits in the series add the O_BENEATH flag to openat(2); this prevents the opening of paths with a leading '/' or that contain '..'.
  • A later commit in the series adds a prctl(2) operation to implicitly force the use of the O_BENEATH flag for all openat(2) operations for a task.
  • The penultimate commits in the series extend the seccomp_data structure to include the tid/tgid of the running process in the input data for any seccomp BPF programs; this allows the filter to police operations so that only the current thread or process can be targetted.
  • The final commit in the series exports additional headers and constants for system call numbers so that userspace tools can simultaneously access the different values for all x86 architectures.

The procdesc-<ver> branch holds a separate patch set that provides an implementation of Capsicum's process descriptors, building on draft patches from Josh Triplett in an incremental manner. Note that this patchset is completely independent from the capsicum-hooks-<ver> patchset.

The misc-<ver> branch holds a few independent fixes that are not required for Capsicum functionality, but which should ideally be upstreamed at some point.

The no-upstream-<ver> branch holds local changes that should never be upstreamed; they are held locally purely for the convenience of the Capsicum developers.

Development Branch

The capsicum branch is the main Capsicum development branch (and so may contain in-progress code); the capsicum-test repository is normally kept in sync with this branch. This branch is never rebased; new upstream kernel releases are merged into it as they become available.

Fixes to the Capsicum functionality on this branch will also be merged into the appropriate topic branch. As a result, a merge of the latest versions of the four topic branches should normally be equivalent to the current status of the capsicum branch.

Capsicum branch structure

Provenance

This Capsicum implementation is based on:

  • the original Capsicum implementation in FreeBSD 9.x and 10.x, written by Robert Watson, Jonathan Anderson and Pawel Dawidek
  • an earlier Linux kernel implementation written by Meredydd Luff in 2012.

The current functionality is based on the 4.2 upstream kernel.

Functionality Overview

Capsicum introduces a new kind of file descriptor, a capability file descriptor, which has a limited set of rights associated with it. Operations on a capability FD that are not allowed by the associated rights are rejected (with ENOTCAPABLE), and the rights associated with a capability FD can only be narrowed, not widened.

Capsicum also introduces capability mode, which disables (with ECAPMODE) all syscalls that access any kind of global namespace; this is mostly (but not completely) implemented in userspace as a seccomp-bpf filter.

See Documentation/security/capsicum.txt for more details

As process management normally involves a global namespace (that of pid_t values), Capsicum also introduces a process descriptor and related syscalls, which allows processes to be manipulated as another kind of file descriptor. This functionality is based on Josh Triplett's proposed clonefd patches.

Building

Capsicum support is currently included for x86 variants and user-mode Linux; the following config settings need to be enabled:

  • CONFIG_SECURITY_CAPSICUM enables Capsicum capabilities
  • CONFIG_CLONE4 enables the clone4(2) system call, which is needed for...
  • CONFIG_CLONEFD enables the clonefd functionality that process descriptors are built on.

The following configuration options are useful for development:

  • CONFIG_DEBUG_KMEMLEAK: enable kernel memory leak detection.
  • CONFIG_DEBUG_BUGVERBOSE: verbose bug reporting.

User-mode Linux can be used for Capsicum testing, and requires the following additional configuration parameters:

  • CONFIG_DEBUG_FS: enable debug filesystem.

Testing

The test suite for Capsicum is held in a separate capsicum-test repository, to allow the tests to be easily shared between Linux and FreeBSD.

This repository also includes kernel self-tests for some aspects of Capsicum functionality, specifically:

  • selftests/openat: tests of openat(2) and the new O_BENEATH flag for it.
  • selftests/clone: tests of the clonefd functionality used for process descriptors.

There are also some test scripts in the tools/testing/capsicum/ directory, purely for local convenience when testing under user-mode Linux (ARCH=um).

UML Testing Setup

Capsicum can be run and tested in a user-mode Linux build, for convenience and speed of development iterations. This section describes the setup procedure for this method of testing.

Create a file to use as the disk for user-mode Linux (UML):

# Create (sparse) empty file
dd if=/dev/zero of=tools/testing/capsicum/test.img bs=1 count=0 seek=500MB
# Make an ext3 filesystem in it
mke2fs -t ext3 -F tools/testing/capsicum/test.img

Mount the new file system somewhere:

sudo mount -o loop tools/testing/capsicum/test.img /mnt

Put an Ubuntu base system onto it:

sudo debootstrap --arch=amd64 --include libsctp1 trusty /mnt http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu

Replace some key files:

sudo cp /mnt/sbin/init /mnt/sbin/init.orig
sudo cp tools/testing/capsicum/test-files/init /mnt/sbin/init
sudo cp /mnt/etc/fstab /mnt/etc/fstab.orig
sudo cp tools/testing/capsicum/test-files/fstab /mnt/etc/fstab
sudo umount /mnt

Copy test binaries into the test directory:

pushd ${CAPSICUM-TEST} && make && popd
cp ${CAPSICUM-TEST}/capsicum-test tools/testing/capsicum/test-files/
cp ${CAPSICUM-TEST}/mini-me tools/testing/capsicum/test-files/
cp ${CAPSICUM-TEST}/mini-me.noexec tools/testing/capsicum/test-files/

Tests can then be run with the wrapper scripts:

cd tools/testing/capsicum
./run-test ./capsicum-test

Under the covers the init script will mount tools/testing/capsicum/test-files/ as /tests/ within the UML system, and will run tests from there. The specific test command to run is communicated into the UML instance as a runtest=<cmd> parameter to the UML kernel (which the init script retrieves from /proc/cmdline).