userfaultfd: add /dev/userfaultfd for fine grained access control

Historically, it has been shown that intercepting kernel faults with
userfaultfd (thereby forcing the kernel to wait for an arbitrary amount of
time) can be exploited, or at least can make some kinds of exploits
easier.  So, in 37cd0575b8 "userfaultfd: add UFFD_USER_MODE_ONLY" we
changed things so, in order for kernel faults to be handled by
userfaultfd, either the process needs CAP_SYS_PTRACE, or this sysctl must
be configured so that any unprivileged user can do it.

In a typical implementation of a hypervisor with live migration (take
QEMU/KVM as one such example), we do indeed need to be able to handle
kernel faults.  But, both options above are less than ideal:

- Toggling the sysctl increases attack surface by allowing any
  unprivileged user to do it.

- Granting the live migration process CAP_SYS_PTRACE gives it this
  ability, but *also* the ability to "observe and control the
  execution of another process [...], and examine and change [its]
  memory and registers" (from ptrace(2)). This isn't something we need
  or want to be able to do, so granting this permission violates the
  "principle of least privilege".

This is all a long winded way to say: we want a more fine-grained way to
grant access to userfaultfd, without granting other additional permissions
at the same time.

To achieve this, add a /dev/userfaultfd misc device.  This device provides
an alternative to the userfaultfd(2) syscall for the creation of new
userfaultfds.  The idea is, any userfaultfds created this way will be able
to handle kernel faults, without the caller having any special
capabilities.  Access to this mechanism is instead restricted using e.g. 
standard filesystem permissions.

[[email protected]: Handle misc_register() failure properly]
  Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/[email protected]
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/[email protected]
Signed-off-by: Axel Rasmussen <[email protected]>
Acked-by: Nadav Amit <[email protected]>
Acked-by: Peter Xu <[email protected]>
Acked-by: Mike Rapoport <[email protected]>
Cc: Al Viro <[email protected]>
Cc: Dave Hansen <[email protected]>
Cc: Dmitry V. Levin <[email protected]>
Cc: Gleb Fotengauer-Malinovskiy <[email protected]>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <[email protected]>
Cc: Jan Kara <[email protected]>
Cc: Jonathan Corbet <[email protected]>
Cc: Mel Gorman <[email protected]>
Cc: Mike Kravetz <[email protected]>
Cc: Shuah Khan <[email protected]>
Cc: Shuah Khan <[email protected]>
Cc: Suren Baghdasaryan <[email protected]>
Cc: Vlastimil Babka <[email protected]>
Cc: Zhang Yi <[email protected]>
Cc: Mike Rapoport <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <[email protected]>

1 files changed, 4 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/uapi/linux/userfaultfd.h b/include/uapi/linux/userfaultfd.h
index 7d32b1e797fb..005e5e306266 100644
--- a/include/uapi/linux/userfaultfd.h
+++ b/include/uapi/linux/userfaultfd.h
@@ -12,6 +12,10 @@
 
 #include <linux/types.h>
 
+/* ioctls for /dev/userfaultfd */
+#define USERFAULTFD_IOC 0xAA
+#define USERFAULTFD_IOC_NEW _IO(USERFAULTFD_IOC, 0x00)
+
 /*
  * If the UFFDIO_API is upgraded someday, the UFFDIO_UNREGISTER and
  * UFFDIO_WAKE ioctls should be defined as _IOW and not as _IOR.  In