This patch implements an API whereby an application can determine the
label of its peer's Unix datagram sockets via the auxiliary data mechanism of
recvmsg.
Patch purpose:
This patch enables a security-aware application to retrieve the
security context of the peer of a Unix datagram socket. The application
can then use this security context to determine the security context for
processing on behalf of the peer who sent the packet.
Patch design and implementation:
The design and implementation is very similar to the UDP case for INET
sockets. Basically we build upon the existing Unix domain socket API for
retrieving user credentials. Linux offers the API for obtaining user
credentials via ancillary messages (i.e., out of band/control messages
that are bundled together with a normal message). To retrieve the security
context, the application first indicates to the kernel such desire by
setting the SO_PASSSEC option via getsockopt. Then the application
retrieves the security context using the auxiliary data mechanism.
An example server application for Unix datagram socket should look like this:
toggle = 1;
toggle_len = sizeof(toggle);
setsockopt(sockfd, SOL_SOCKET, SO_PASSSEC, &toggle, &toggle_len);
recvmsg(sockfd, &msg_hdr, 0);
if (msg_hdr.msg_controllen > sizeof(struct cmsghdr)) {
cmsg_hdr = CMSG_FIRSTHDR(&msg_hdr);
if (cmsg_hdr->cmsg_len <= CMSG_LEN(sizeof(scontext)) &&
cmsg_hdr->cmsg_level == SOL_SOCKET &&
cmsg_hdr->cmsg_type == SCM_SECURITY) {
memcpy(&scontext, CMSG_DATA(cmsg_hdr), sizeof(scontext));
}
}
sock_setsockopt is enhanced with a new socket option SOCK_PASSSEC to allow
a server socket to receive security context of the peer.
Testing:
We have tested the patch by setting up Unix datagram client and server
applications. We verified that the server can retrieve the security context
using the auxiliary data mechanism of recvmsg.
Signed-off-by: Catherine Zhang <cxzhang@watson.ibm.com>
Acked-by: Acked-by: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history,
even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git
archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about
3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early
git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good
infrastructure for it.
Let it rip!
Catherine Zhang
Ralf Baechle
Patrick McHardy
Linus Torvalds