On Wed, Mar 25, 2020 at 8:29 AM Richard Guy Briggs <rgb(a)redhat.com> wrote:
On 2020-03-20 17:56, Paul Moore wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 19, 2020 at 5:48 PM Richard Guy Briggs <rgb(a)redhat.com> wrote:
> > On 2020-03-18 17:47, Paul Moore wrote:
> > > On Wed, Mar 18, 2020 at 5:42 PM Richard Guy Briggs <rgb(a)redhat.com>
wrote:
> > > > On 2020-03-18 17:01, Paul Moore wrote:
> > > > > On Fri, Mar 13, 2020 at 3:23 PM Richard Guy Briggs
<rgb(a)redhat.com> wrote:
> > > > > > On 2020-03-13 12:42, Paul Moore wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > ...
> > > > >
> > > > > > > The thread has had a lot of starts/stops, so I may be
repeating a
> > > > > > > previous suggestion, but one idea would be to still
emit a "death
> > > > > > > record" when the final task in the audit
container ID does die, but
> > > > > > > block the particular audit container ID from reuse
until it the
> > > > > > > SIGNAL2 info has been reported. This gives us the
timely ACID death
> > > > > > > notification while still preventing confusion and
ambiguity caused by
> > > > > > > potentially reusing the ACID before the SIGNAL2 record
has been sent;
> > > > > > > there is a small nit about the ACID being present in
the SIGNAL2
> > > > > > > *after* its death, but I think that can be easily
explained and
> > > > > > > understood by admins.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Thinking quickly about possible technical solutions to
this, maybe it
> > > > > > makes sense to have two counters on a contobj so that we
know when the
> > > > > > last process in that container exits and can issue the
death
> > > > > > certificate, but we still block reuse of it until all
further references
> > > > > > to it have been resolved. This will likely also make it
possible to
> > > > > > report the full contid chain in SIGNAL2 records. This will
eliminate
> > > > > > some of the issues we are discussing with regards to
passing a contobj
> > > > > > vs a contid to the audit_log_contid function, but won't
eliminate them
> > > > > > all because there are still some contids that won't
have an object
> > > > > > associated with them to make it impossible to look them up
in the
> > > > > > contobj lists.
> > > > >
> > > > > I'm not sure you need a full second counter, I imagine a
simple flag
> > > > > would be okay. I think you just something to indicate that this
ACID
> > > > > object is marked as "dead" but it still being held for
sanity reasons
> > > > > and should not be reused.
> > > >
> > > > Ok, I see your point. This refcount can be changed to a flag easily
> > > > enough without change to the api if we can be sure that more than
one
> > > > signal can't be delivered to the audit daemon *and* collected by
sig2.
> > > > I'll have a more careful look at the audit daemon code to see if
I can
> > > > determine this.
> > >
> > > Maybe I'm not understanding your concern, but this isn't really
> > > different than any of the other things we track for the auditd signal
> > > sender, right? If we are worried about multiple signals being sent
> > > then it applies to everything, not just the audit container ID.
> >
> > Yes, you are right. In all other cases the information is simply
> > overwritten. In the case of the audit container identifier any
> > previous value is put before a new one is referenced, so only the last
> > signal is kept. So, we only need a flag. Does a flag implemented with
> > a rcu-protected refcount sound reasonable to you?
>
> Well, if I recall correctly you still need to fix the locking in this
> patchset so until we see what that looks like it is hard to say for
> certain. Just make sure that the flag is somehow protected from
> races; it is probably a lot like the "valid" flags you sometimes see
> with RCU protected lists.
This is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Can you point me to
some code that does "valid" flags with RCU protected lists.
Sigh. Come on Richard, you've been playing in the kernel for some
time now. I can't think of one off the top of my head as I write
this, but there are several resources that deal with RCU protected
lists in the kernel, Google is your friend and Documentation/RCU is
your friend.
Spending time to learn how RCU works and how to use it properly is not
time wasted. It's a tricky thing to get right (I have to refresh my
memory on some of the more subtle details each time I write/review RCU
code), but it's very cool when done correctly.
--
paul moore
www.paul-moore.com