KEYS: Allow special keyrings to be cleared

The kernel contains some special internal keyrings, for instance the DNS
resolver keyring :

2a93faf1 I-----     1 perm 1f030000     0     0 keyring   .dns_resolver: empty

It would occasionally be useful to allow the contents of such keyrings to be
flushed by root (cache invalidation).

Allow a flag to be set on a keyring to mark that someone possessing the
sysadmin capability can clear the keyring, even without normal write access to
the keyring.

Set this flag on the special keyrings created by the DNS resolver, the NFS
identity mapper and the CIFS identity mapper.

Signed-off-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Jeff Layton <jlayton@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Steve Dickson <steved@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>

1 files changed, 4 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/security/keys.txt b/Documentation/security/keys.txt
index 4d75931..713ec23 100644
--- a/Documentation/security/keys.txt
+++ b/Documentation/security/keys.txt
@@ -554,6 +554,10 @@ The keyctl syscall functions are:
      process must have write permission on the keyring, and it must be a
      keyring (or else error ENOTDIR will result).
 
+     This function can also be used to clear special kernel keyrings if they
+     are appropriately marked if the user has CAP_SYS_ADMIN capability.  The
+     DNS resolver cache keyring is an example of this.
+
 
  (*) Link a key into a keyring: