cred: Do not default to init_cred in prepare_kernel_cred()

A common exploit pattern for ROP attacks is to abuse prepare_kernel_cred()
in order to construct escalated privileges[1]. Instead of providing a
short-hand argument (NULL) to the "daemon" argument to indicate using
init_cred as the base cred, require that "daemon" is always set to
an actual task. Replace all existing callers that were passing NULL
with &init_task.

Future attacks will need to have sufficiently powerful read/write
primitives to have found an appropriately privileged task and written it
to the ROP stack as an argument to succeed, which is similarly difficult
to the prior effort needed to escalate privileges before struct cred
existed: locate the current cred and overwrite the uid member.

This has the added benefit of meaning that prepare_kernel_cred() can no
longer exceed the privileges of the init task, which may have changed from
the original init_cred (e.g. dropping capabilities from the bounding set).

[1] https://google.com/search?q=commit_creds(prepare_kernel_cred(0))

Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" <[email protected]>
Cc: David Howells <[email protected]>
Cc: "Rafael J. Wysocki" <[email protected]>
Cc: Steve French <[email protected]>
Cc: Ronnie Sahlberg <[email protected]>
Cc: Shyam Prasad N <[email protected]>
Cc: Tom Talpey <[email protected]>
Cc: Namjae Jeon <[email protected]>
Cc: Trond Myklebust <[email protected]>
Cc: Anna Schumaker <[email protected]>
Cc: Chuck Lever <[email protected]>
Cc: Jeff Layton <[email protected]>
Cc: "David S. Miller" <[email protected]>
Cc: Eric Dumazet <[email protected]>
Cc: Jakub Kicinski <[email protected]>
Cc: Paolo Abeni <[email protected]>
Cc: "Michal Koutný" <[email protected]>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]
Signed-off-by: Kees Cook <[email protected]>
Acked-by: Luis Chamberlain <[email protected]>
Reviewed-by: Sergey Senozhatsky <[email protected]>
Acked-by: Russ Weight <[email protected]>
Acked-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <[email protected]>
Acked-by: Paulo Alcantara (SUSE) <[email protected]>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/[email protected]

1 files changed, 7 insertions, 8 deletions

diff --git a/kernel/cred.c b/kernel/cred.c
index e10c15f51c1f..811ad654abd1 100644
--- a/kernel/cred.c
+++ b/kernel/cred.c
@@ -701,9 +701,9 @@ void __init cred_init(void)
  * override a task's own credentials so that work can be done on behalf of that
  * task that requires a different subjective context.
  *
- * @daemon is used to provide a base for the security record, but can be NULL.
- * If @daemon is supplied, then the security data will be derived from that;
- * otherwise they'll be set to 0 and no groups, full capabilities and no keys.
+ * @daemon is used to provide a base cred, with the security data derived from
+ * that; if this is "&init_task", they'll be set to 0, no groups, full
+ * capabilities, and no keys.
  *
  * The caller may change these controls afterwards if desired.
  *
@@ -714,17 +714,16 @@ struct cred *prepare_kernel_cred(struct task_struct *daemon)
 	const struct cred *old;
 	struct cred *new;
 
+	if (WARN_ON_ONCE(!daemon))
+		return NULL;
+
 	new = kmem_cache_alloc(cred_jar, GFP_KERNEL);
 	if (!new)
 		return NULL;
 
 	kdebug("prepare_kernel_cred() alloc %p", new);
 
-	if (daemon)
-		old = get_task_cred(daemon);
-	else
-		old = get_cred(&init_cred);
-
+	old = get_task_cred(daemon);
 	validate_creds(old);
 
 	*new = *old;