sysctl: allow for strict write position handling

When writing to a sysctl string, each write, regardless of VFS position,
begins writing the string from the start.  This means the contents of
the last write to the sysctl controls the string contents instead of the
first:

  open("/proc/sys/kernel/modprobe", O_WRONLY)   = 1
  write(1, "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA"..., 4096) = 4096
  write(1, "/bin/true", 9)                = 9
  close(1)                                = 0

  $ cat /proc/sys/kernel/modprobe
  /bin/true

Expected behaviour would be to have the sysctl be "AAAA..." capped at
maxlen (in this case KMOD_PATH_LEN: 256), instead of truncating to the
contents of the second write.  Similarly, multiple short writes would
not append to the sysctl.

The old behavior is unlike regular POSIX files enough that doing audits
of software that interact with sysctls can end up in unexpected or
dangerous situations.  For example, "as long as the input starts with a
trusted path" turns out to be an insufficient filter, as what must also
happen is for the input to be entirely contained in a single write
syscall -- not a common consideration, especially for high level tools.

This provides kernel.sysctl_writes_strict as a way to make this behavior
act in a less surprising manner for strings, and disallows non-zero file
position when writing numeric sysctls (similar to what is already done
when reading from non-zero file positions).  For now, the default (0) is
to warn about non-zero file position use, but retain the legacy
behavior.  Setting this to -1 disables the warning, and setting this to
1 enables the file position respecting behavior.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix build]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: move misplaced hunk, per Randy]
Signed-off-by: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Cc: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 21 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/sysctl/kernel.txt b/Documentation/sysctl/kernel.txt
index 9886c3d..708bb7f 100644
--- a/Documentation/sysctl/kernel.txt
+++ b/Documentation/sysctl/kernel.txt
@@ -77,6 +77,7 @@ show up in /proc/sys/kernel:
 - shmmni
 - stop-a                      [ SPARC only ]
 - sysrq                       ==> Documentation/sysrq.txt
+- sysctl_writes_strict
 - tainted
 - threads-max
 - unknown_nmi_panic
@@ -762,6 +763,26 @@ without users and with a dead originative process will be destroyed.
 
 ==============================================================
 
+sysctl_writes_strict:
+
+Control how file position affects the behavior of updating sysctl values
+via the /proc/sys interface:
+
+  -1 - Legacy per-write sysctl value handling, with no printk warnings.
+       Each write syscall must fully contain the sysctl value to be
+       written, and multiple writes on the same sysctl file descriptor
+       will rewrite the sysctl value, regardless of file position.
+   0 - (default) Same behavior as above, but warn about processes that
+       perform writes to a sysctl file descriptor when the file position
+       is not 0.
+   1 - Respect file position when writing sysctl strings. Multiple writes
+       will append to the sysctl value buffer. Anything past the max length
+       of the sysctl value buffer will be ignored. Writes to numeric sysctl
+       entries must always be at file position 0 and the value must be
+       fully contained in the buffer sent in the write syscall.
+
+==============================================================
+
 tainted:
 
 Non-zero if the kernel has been tainted.  Numeric values, which