Re: [patch 7/9] unprivileged mounts: allow unprivileged fuse mounts

From: Pavel Machek
Date: Tue Jan 08 2008 - 17:58:26 EST


On Tue 2008-01-08 23:42:20, Miklos Szeredi wrote:
> > On Tue 2008-01-08 12:35:09, Miklos Szeredi wrote:
> > > From: Miklos Szeredi <mszeredi@xxxxxxx>
> > >
> > > Use FS_SAFE for "fuse" fs type, but not for "fuseblk".
> > >
> > > FUSE was designed from the beginning to be safe for unprivileged users. This
> > > has also been verified in practice over many years. In addition unprivileged
> >
> > Eh? So 'kill -9 no longer works' and 'suspend no longer works' is not
> > considered important enough to even mention?
>
> No. Because in practice they don't seem to matter. Also because
> there's no way in which fuse could be done differently to address
> these issues.
>
> The 'kill -9' thing is basically due to VFS level locking not being
> interruptible. It could be changed, but I'm not sure it's worth it.

Well, I believe it should be changed. "You need to mount /sys, then
echo X to Y before kill -9 works" does not look nice... I agree it is
not easy.

> > 'updatedb no longer works' is not a problem?
>
> I haven't seen any problems with updatedb, and haven't had any bug
> reports about it either.

Ok, I don't know much about FUSE. In current version, if user creates
infinite maze and mounts it under ~, updatedb just does not enter it?

> AFAIR there were two security vulnerabilities in fuse's history, one
> of them an information leak in the kernel module, and the other one an
> mtab corruption issue in the fusermount utility. I don't think this
> is such a bad track record.

Not bad indeed. But I'd consider 'kill -9 not working' to be DoS
vulnerability... and I'm woried about problems fuse + user mounts
expose in other parts of system.
Pavel
--
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