[patch 01/10] unprivileged mounts: add user mounts to the kernel

Previous thread: [patch 04/10] unprivileged mounts: propagate error values from clone_mnt by Miklos Szeredi on Friday, April 27, 2007 - 8:04 am. (1 message)

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To: <akpm@...>, <serue@...>, <viro@...>, <linuxram@...>, <ebiederm@...>, <kzak@...>
Cc: <linux-fsdevel@...>, <linux-kernel@...>, <containers@...>
Date: Friday, April 27, 2007 - 8:04 am

From: Miklos Szeredi <mszeredi@suse.cz>

This patchset adds support for keeping mount ownership information in the
kernel, and allow unprivileged mount(2) and umount(2) in certain cases.

The mount owner has the following privileges:

- unmount the owned mount
- create a submount under the owned mount

The sysadmin can set the owner explicitly on mount and remount. When an
unprivileged user creates a mount, then the owner is automatically set to the
user.

The following use cases are envisioned:

1) Private namespace, with selected mounts owned by user. E.g.
/home/$USER is a good candidate for allowing unpriv mounts and unmounts
within.

2) Private namespace, with all mounts owned by user and having the "nosuid"
flag. User can mount and umount anywhere within the namespace, but suid
programs will not work.

3) Global namespace, with a designated directory, which is a mount owned by
the user. E.g. /mnt/users/$USER is set up so that it is bind mounted onto
itself, and set to be owned by $USER. The user can add/remove mounts only
under this directory.

The following extra security measures are taken for unprivileged mounts:

- usermounts are limited by a sysctl tunable
- force "nosuid,nodev" mount options on the created mount

For testing unprivileged mounts (and for other purposes) simple
mount/umount utilities are available from:

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/mszeredi/mmount/

I'll also submit a patch to util-linux, to add the same functionality
to mount(8) and umount(8).

This patch:

A new mount flag, MS_SETUSER is used to make a mount owned by a user. If this
flag is specified, then the owner will be set to the current fsuid and the
mount will be marked with the MNT_USER flag. On remount don't preserve
previous owner, and treat MS_SETUSER as for a new mount. The MS_SETUSER flag
is ignored on mount move.

The MNT_USER flag is not copied on any kind of mount cloning: namespace
creation, binding or ...

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