pipe: limit the per-user amount of pages allocated in pipes

On no-so-small systems, it is possible for a single process to cause an
OOM condition by filling large pipes with data that are never read. A
typical process filling 4000 pipes with 1 MB of data will use 4 GB of
memory. On small systems it may be tricky to set the pipe max size to
prevent this from happening.

This patch makes it possible to enforce a per-user soft limit above
which new pipes will be limited to a single page, effectively limiting
them to 4 kB each, as well as a hard limit above which no new pipes may
be created for this user. This has the effect of protecting the system
against memory abuse without hurting other users, and still allowing
pipes to work correctly though with less data at once.

The limit are controlled by two new sysctls : pipe-user-pages-soft, and
pipe-user-pages-hard. Both may be disabled by setting them to zero. The
default soft limit allows the default number of FDs per process (1024)
to create pipes of the default size (64kB), thus reaching a limit of 64MB
before starting to create only smaller pipes. With 256 processes limited
to 1024 FDs each, this results in 1024*64kB + (256*1024 - 1024) * 4kB =
1084 MB of memory allocated for a user. The hard limit is disabled by
default to avoid breaking existing applications that make intensive use
of pipes (eg: for splicing).

Reported-by: socketpair@gmail.com
Reported-by: Tetsuo Handa <penguin-kernel@I-love.SAKURA.ne.jp>
Mitigates: CVE-2013-4312 (Linux 2.0+)
Suggested-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Willy Tarreau <w@1wt.eu>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>

1 files changed, 23 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/sysctl/fs.txt b/Documentation/sysctl/fs.txt
index 88152f2..302b5ed 100644
--- a/Documentation/sysctl/fs.txt
+++ b/Documentation/sysctl/fs.txt
@@ -32,6 +32,8 @@ Currently, these files are in /proc/sys/fs:
 - nr_open
 - overflowuid
 - overflowgid
+- pipe-user-pages-hard
+- pipe-user-pages-soft
 - protected_hardlinks
 - protected_symlinks
 - suid_dumpable
@@ -159,6 +161,27 @@ The default is 65534.
 
 ==============================================================
 
+pipe-user-pages-hard:
+
+Maximum total number of pages a non-privileged user may allocate for pipes.
+Once this limit is reached, no new pipes may be allocated until usage goes
+below the limit again. When set to 0, no limit is applied, which is the default
+setting.
+
+==============================================================
+
+pipe-user-pages-soft:
+
+Maximum total number of pages a non-privileged user may allocate for pipes
+before the pipe size gets limited to a single page. Once this limit is reached,
+new pipes will be limited to a single page in size for this user in order to
+limit total memory usage, and trying to increase them using fcntl() will be
+denied until usage goes below the limit again. The default value allows to
+allocate up to 1024 pipes at their default size. When set to 0, no limit is
+applied.
+
+==============================================================
+
 protected_hardlinks:
 
 A long-standing class of security issues is the hardlink-based