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  • Eric W. Biederman's avatar
    fs: Allow superblock owner to replace invalid owners of inodes · 0031181c
    Eric W. Biederman authored
    
    
    Allow users with CAP_SYS_CHOWN over the superblock of a filesystem to
    chown files when inode owner is invalid.  Ordinarily the
    capable_wrt_inode_uidgid check is sufficient to allow access to files
    but when the underlying filesystem has uids or gids that don't map to
    the current user namespace it is not enough, so the chown permission
    checks need to be extended to allow this case.
    
    Calling chown on filesystem nodes whose uid or gid don't map is
    necessary if those nodes are going to be modified as writing back
    inodes which contain uids or gids that don't map is likely to cause
    filesystem corruption of the uid or gid fields.
    
    Once chown has been called the existing capable_wrt_inode_uidgid
    checks are sufficient to allow the owner of a superblock to do anything
    the global root user can do with an appropriate set of capabilities.
    
    An ordinary filesystem mountable by a userns root will limit all uids
    and gids in s_user_ns or the INVALID_UID and INVALID_GID to flag all
    others.  So having this added permission limited to just INVALID_UID
    and INVALID_GID is sufficient to handle every case on an ordinary filesystem.
    
    Of the virtual filesystems at least proc is known to set s_user_ns to
    something other than &init_user_ns, while at the same time presenting
    some files owned by GLOBAL_ROOT_UID.  Those files the mounter of proc
    in a user namespace should not be able to chown to get access to.
    Limiting the relaxation in permission to just the minimum of allowing
    changing INVALID_UID and INVALID_GID prevents problems with cases like
    that.
    
    The original version of this patch was written by: Seth Forshee.  I
    have rewritten and rethought this patch enough so it's really not the
    same thing (certainly it needs a different description), but he
    deserves credit for getting out there and getting the conversation
    started, and finding the potential gotcha's and putting up with my
    semi-paranoid feedback.
    
    Inspired-by: default avatarSeth Forshee <seth.forshee@canonical.com>
    Acked-by: default avatarSeth Forshee <seth.forshee@canonical.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarEric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>
    0031181c