Author Archives: jamesm

Linux Security Summit North America 2018 CFP Announced

lss logo

The CFP for the 2018 Linux Security Summit North America (LSS-NA) is announced.

LSS will be held this year as two separate events, one in North America
(LSS-NA), and one in Europe (LSS-EU), to facilitate broader participation in
Linux Security development. Note that this CFP is for LSS-NA; a separate CFP
will be announced for LSS-EU in May. We encourage everyone to attend both
events.

LSS-NA 2018 will be held in Vancouver, Canada, co-located with the Open Source Summit.

The CFP closes on June 3rd and the event runs from 27th-28th August.

To make a CFP submission, click here.

LCA 2018 Kernel Miniconf – SELinux Namespacing Slides

I gave a short talk on SELinux namespacing today at the Linux.conf.au Kernel Miniconf in Sydney — the slides from the talk are here: http://namei.org/presentations/selinux_namespacing_lca2018.pdf

This is a work in progress to which I’ve been contributing, following on from initial discussions at Linux Plumbers 2017.

In brief, there’s a growing need to be able to provide SELinux confinement within containers: typically, SELinux appears disabled within a container on Fedora-based systems, as a workaround for a lack of container support.  Underlying this is a requirement to provide per-namespace SELinux instances,  where each container has its own SELinux policy and private kernel SELinux APIs.

A prototype for SELinux namespacing was developed by Stephen Smalley, who released the code via https://github.com/stephensmalley/selinux-kernel/tree/selinuxns.  There were and still are many TODO items.  I’ve since been working on providing namespacing support to on-disk inode labels, which are represented by security xattrs.  See the v0.2 patch post for more details.

Much of this work will be of interest to other LSMs such as Smack, and many architectural and technical issues remain to be solved.  For those interested in this work, please see the slides, which include a couple of overflow pages detailing some known but as yet unsolved issues (supplied by Stephen Smalley).

I anticipate discussions on this and related topics (LSM stacking, core namespaces) later in the year at Plumbers and the Linux Security Summit(s), at least.

The session was live streamed — I gather a standalone video will be available soon!

ETA: the video is up! See:

Save the Dates: Linux Security Summit Events for 2018

There will be a new European version of the Linux Security Summit for 2018, in addition to the established North American event.

The dates and locations are as follows:

Stay tuned for CFP announcements!

 

Security Session at the 2017 Kernel Summit

For folks attending Open Source Summit Europe next week in Prague, note that there is a security session planned as part of the co-located Kernel Summit technical track.

This year, the Kernel Summit is divided into two components:

  1. An invitation-only maintainer summit of 30 people total, and;
  2. An open kernel summit technical track which is open to all attendees of OSS Europe.

The security session is part of the latter.  The preliminary agenda for the kernel summit technical track was announced by Ted Ts’o here:

There is also a preliminary agenda for the security session, here:

Currently, the agenda includes an update from Kees Cook on the Kernel Self Protection Project, and an update from Jarkko Sakkinen on TPM support.  I’ll provide a summary of the recent Linux Security Summit, depending on available time, perhaps focusing on security namespacing issues.

This agenda is subject to change and if you have any topics to propose, please send an email to the ksummit-discuss list.

 

Linux Security Summit 2017 Roundup

The 2017 Linux Security Summit (LSS) was held last month in Los Angeles over the 14th and 15th of September.  It was co-located with Open Source Summit North America (OSSNA) and the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC).

LSS 2017 sign at conference

LSS 2017

Once again we were fortunate to have general logistics managed by the Linux Foundation, allowing the program committee to focus on organizing technical content.  We had a record number of submissions this year and accepted approximately one third of them.  Attendance was very strong, with ~160 attendees — another record for the event.

LSS 2017 Attendees

LSS 2017 Attendees

On the day prior to LSS, attendees were able to access a day of LPC, which featured two tracks with a security focus:

Many thanks to the LPC organizers for arranging the schedule this way and allowing LSS folk to attend the day!

Realtime notes were made of these microconfs via etherpad:

I was particularly interested in the topic of better integrating LSM with containers, as there is an increasingly common requirement for nesting of security policies, where each container may run its own apparently independent security policy, and also a potentially independent security model.  I proposed the approach of introducing a security namespace, where all security interfaces within the kernel are namespaced, including LSM.  It would potentially solve the container use-cases, and also the full LSM stacking case championed by Casey Schaufler (which would allow entirely arbitrary stacking of security modules).

This would be a very challenging project, to say the least, and one which is further complicated by containers not being a first class citizen of the kernel.   This leads to security policy boundaries clashing with semantic functional boundaries e.g. what does it mean from a security policy POV when you have namespaced filesystems but not networking?

Discussion turned to the idea that it is up to the vendor/user to configure containers in a way which makes sense for them, and similarly, they would also need to ensure that they configure security policy in a manner appropriate to that configuration.  I would say this means that semantic responsibility is pushed to the user with the kernel largely remaining a set of composable mechanisms, in relation to containers and security policy.  This provides a great deal of flexibility, but requires those building systems to take a great deal of care in their design.

There are still many issues to resolve, both upstream and at the distro/user level, and I expect this to be an active area of Linux security development for some time.  There were some excellent followup discussions in this area, including an approach which constrains the problem space. (Stay tuned)!

A highlight of the TPMs session was an update on the TPM 2.0 software stack, by Philip Tricca and Jarkko Sakkinen.  The slides may be downloaded here.  We should see a vastly improved experience over TPM 1.x with v2.0 hardware capabilities, and the new software stack.  I suppose the next challenge will be TPMs in the post-quantum era?

There were further technical discussions on TPMs and container security during subsequent days at LSS.  Bringing the two conference groups together here made for a very productive event overall.

TPMs microconf at LPC with Philip Tricca presenting on the 2.0 software stack.

This year, due to the overlap with LPC, we unfortunately did not have any LWN coverage.  There are, however, excellent writeups available from attendees:

There were many awesome talks.

The CII Best Practices Badge presentation by David Wheeler was an unexpected highlight for me.  CII refers to the Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative , a preemptive security effort for Open Source.  The Best Practices Badge Program is a secure development maturity model designed to allow open source projects to improve their security in an evolving and measurable manner.  There’s been very impressive engagement with the project from across open source, and I believe this is a critically important effort for security.

CII Bade Project adoption (from David Wheeler’s slides).

During Dan Cashman’s talk on SELinux policy modularization in Android O,  an interesting data point came up:

We of course expect to see application vulnerability mitigations arising from Mandatory Access Control (MAC) policies (SELinux, Smack, and AppArmor), but if you look closely this refers to kernel vulnerabilities.   So what is happening here?  It turns out that a side effect of MAC policies, particularly those implemented in tightly-defined environments such as Android, is a reduction in kernel attack surface.  It is generally more difficult to reach such kernel vulnerabilities when you have MAC security policies.  This is a side-effect of MAC, not a primary design goal, but nevertheless appears to be very effective in practice!

Another highlight for me was the update on the Kernel Self Protection Project lead by Kees, which is now approaching its 2nd anniversary, and continues the important work of hardening the mainline Linux kernel itself against attack.  I would like to also acknowledge the essential and original research performed in this area by grsecurity/PaX, from which this mainline work draws.

From a new development point of view, I’m thrilled to see the progress being made by Mickaël Salaün, on Landlock LSM, which provides unprivileged sandboxing via seccomp and LSM.  This is a novel approach which will allow applications to define and propagate their own sandbox policies.  Similar concepts are available in other OSs such as OSX (seatbelt) and BSD (pledge).  The great thing about Landlock is its consolidation of two existing Linux kernel security interfaces: LSM and Seccomp.  This ensures re-use of existing mechanisms, and aids usability by utilizing already familiar concepts for Linux users.

Overall I found it to be an incredibly productive event, with many new and interesting ideas arising and lots of great collaboration in the hallway, lunch, and dinner tracks.

Slides from LSS may be found linked to the schedule abstracts.

We did not have a video sponsor for the event this year, and we’ll work on that again for next year’s summit.  We have discussed holding LSS again next year in conjunction with OSSNA, which is expected to be in Vancouver in August.

We are also investigating a European LSS in addition to the main summit for 2018 and beyond, as a way to help engage more widely with Linux security folk.  Stay tuned for official announcements on these!

Thanks once again to the awesome event staff at LF, especially Jillian Hall, who ensured everything ran smoothly.  Thanks also to the program committee who review, discuss, and vote on every proposal, ensuring that we have the best content for the event, and who work on technical planning for many months prior to the event.  And of course thanks to the presenters and attendees, without whom there would literally and figuratively be no event :)

See you in 2018!

 

Linux Plumbers Conference Sessions for Linux Security Summit Attendees

Folks attending the 2017 Linux Security Summit (LSS) next week may be also interested in attending the TPMs and Containers sessions at Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) on the Wednesday.

The LPC TPMs microconf will be held in the morning and lead by Matthew Garret, while the containers microconf will be run by Stéphane Graber in the afternoon.  Several security topics will be discussed in the containers session, including namespacing and stacking of LSM, and namespacing of IMA.

Attendance on the Wednesday for LPC is at no extra cost for registered attendees of LSS.  Many thanks to the LPC organizers for arranging this!

There will be followup BOF sessions on LSM stacking and namespacing at LSS on Thursday, per the schedule.

This should be a very productive week for Linux security development: see you there!

Linux Security Summit 2017 Schedule Published

The schedule for the 2017 Linux Security Summit (LSS) is now published.

LSS will be held on September 14th and 15th in Los Angeles, CA, co-located with the new Open Source Summit (which includes LinuxCon, ContainerCon, and CloudCon).

The cost of LSS for attendees is $100 USD. Register here.

Highlights from the schedule include the following refereed presentations:

There’s also be the usual Linux kernel security subsystem updates, and BoF sessions (with LSM namespacing and LSM stacking sessions already planned).

See the schedule for full details of the program, and follow the twitter feed for the event.

This year, we’ll also be co-located with the Linux Plumbers Conference, which will include a containers microconference with several security development topics, and likely also a TPMs microconference.

A good critical mass of Linux security folk should be present across all of these events!

Thanks to the LSS program committee for carefully reviewing all of the submissions, and to the event staff at Linux Foundation for expertly planning the logistics of the event.

See you in Los Angeles!

Linux Security Summit 2017: CFP Announcement

LSS logo

The 2017 Linux Security Summit CFP (Call for Participation) is now open!

See the announcement here.

The summit this year will be held in Los Angeles, USA on 14-15 September. It will be co-located with the Open Source Summit (formerly LinuxCon), and the Linux Plumbers Conference. We’ll follow essentially the same format as the 2016 event (you can find the recap here).

The CFP closes on June 5th, 2017.

Hardening the LSM API

The Linux Security Modules (LSM) API provides security hooks for all security-relevant access control operations within the kernel. It’s a pluggable API, allowing different security models to be configured during compilation, and selected at boot time. LSM has provided enough flexibility to implement several major access control schemes, including SELinux, AppArmor, and Smack.

A downside of this architecture, however, is that the security hooks throughout the kernel (there are hundreds of them) increase the kernel’s attack surface. An attacker with a pointer overwrite vulnerability may be able to overwrite an LSM security hook and redirect execution to other code. This could be as simple as bypassing an access control decision via existing kernel code, or redirecting flow to an arbitrary payload such as a rootkit.

Minimizing the inherent security risk of security features, is, I believe, an essential goal.

Recently, as part of the Kernel Self Protection Project, support for marking kernel pages as read-only after init (ro_after_init) was merged, based on grsecurity/pax code. (You can read more about this in Kees Cook’s blog here). In cases where kernel pages are not modified after the kernel is initialized, hardware RO page protections are set on those pages at the end of the kernel initialization process. This is currently supported on several architectures (including x86 and ARM), with more architectures in progress.

It turns out that the LSM hook operations make an ideal candidate for ro_after_init marking, as these hooks are populated during kernel initialization and then do not change (except in one case, explained below). I’ve implemented support for ro_after_init hardening for LSM hooks in the security-next tree, aiming to merge it to Linus for v4.11.

Note that there is one existing case where hooks need to be updated, for runtime SELinux disabling via the ‘disable’ selinuxfs node. Normally, to disable SELinux, you would use selinux=0 at the kernel command line. The runtime disable feature was requested by Fedora folk to handle platforms where the kernel command line is problematic. I’m not sure if this is still the case anywhere. I strongly suggest migrating away from runtime disablement, as configuring support for it in the kernel (via CONFIG_SECURITY_SELINUX_DISABLE) will cause the ro_after_init protection for LSM to be disabled. Use selinux=0 instead, if you need to disable SELinux.

It should be noted, of course, that an attacker with enough control over the kernel could directly change hardware page protections. We are not trying to mitigate that threat here — rather, the goal is to harden the security hooks against being used to gain that level of control.