Application isolation with AppArmor – part IV June 6, 2014

Last time I discussed AppArmor, I talked about new features in Ubuntu 13.10 and a bit about ApplicationConfinement for Ubuntu Touch. With the release of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, several improvements were made:

• Mediation of signals
• Mediation of ptrace
• Various policy updates for 14.04, including new tunables, better support for XDG user directories, and Unity7 abstractions
• Parser policy compilation performance improvements
• Google Summer of Code (SUSE sponsored) python rewrite of the userspace tools

Signal and ptrace mediation

Prior to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, a confined process could send signals to other processes (subject to DAC) and ptrace other processes (subject to DAC and YAMA). AppArmor on 14.04 LTS adds mediation of both signals and ptrace which brings important security improvements for all AppArmor confined applications, such as those in the Ubuntu AppStore and qemu/kvm machines as managed by libvirt and OpenStack.

When developing policy for signal and ptrace rules, it is important to remember that AppArmor does a cross check such that AppArmor verifies that:

• the process sending the signal/performing the ptrace is allowed to send the signal to/ptrace the target process
• the target process receiving the signal/being ptraced is allowed to receive the signal from/be ptraced by the sender process

Signal(7) permissions use the ‘signal’ rule with the ‘receive/send’ permissions governing signals. PTrace permissions use the ‘ptrace’ rule with the ‘trace/tracedby’ permissions governing ptrace(2) and the ‘read/readby’ permissions governing certain proc(5) filesystem accesses, kcmp(2), futexes (get_robust_list(2)) and perf trace events.

Consider the following denial:

Jun 6 21:39:09 localhost kernel: [221158.831933] type=1400 audit(1402083549.185:782): apparmor="DENIED" operation="ptrace" profile="foo" pid=29142 comm="cat" requested_mask="read" denied_mask="read" peer="unconfined"


This demonstrates that the ‘cat’ binary running under the ‘foo’ profile was unable to read the contents of a /proc entry (in my test, /proc/11300/environ). To allow this process to read /proc entries for unconfined processes, the following rule can be used:

ptrace (read) peer=unconfined,


If the receiving process was confined, the log entry would say ‘peer=”<profile name>”‘ and you would adjust the ‘peer=unconfined’ in the rule to match that in the log denial. In this case, because unconfined processes implicitly can be readby all other processes, we don’t need to specify the cross check rule. If the target process was confined, the profile for the target process would need a rule like this:

ptrace (readby) peer=foo,


Likewise for signal rules, consider this denial:

Jun 6 21:53:15 localhost kernel: [222005.216619] type=1400 audit(1402084395.937:897): apparmor="DENIED" operation="signal" profile="foo" pid=29069 comm="bash" requested_mask="send" denied_mask="send" signal=term peer="unconfined"


This shows that ‘bash’ running under the ‘foo’ profile tried to send the ‘term’ signal to an unconfined process (in my test, I used ‘kill 11300’) and was blocked. Signal rules use ‘read’ and ‘send to determine access, so we can add a rule like so to allow sending of the signal:

signal (send) set=("term") peer=unconfined,


Like with ptrace, a cross-check is performed with signal rules but implicit rules allow unconfined processes to send and receive signals. If pid 11300 were confined, you would adjust the ‘peer=’ in the rule of the foo profile to match the denial in the log, and then adjust the target profile to have something like:

signal (receive) set=("term") peer=foo,


Signal and ptrace rules are very flexible and the AppArmor base abstraction in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS has several rules to help make profiling and transitioning to the new mediation easier:

# Allow other processes to read our /proc entries, futexes, perf tracing and
# kcmp for now
ptrace (readby),
 
# Allow other processes to trace us by default (they will need
# 'trace' in the first place). Administrators can override
# with:
# deny ptrace (tracedby) ...
ptrace (tracedby),
 
# Allow unconfined processes to send us signals by default
signal (receive) peer=unconfined,
 
# Allow us to signal ourselves
signal peer=@{profile_name},
 
# Checking for PID existence is quite common so add it by default for now
signal (receive, send) set=("exists"),


Note the above uses the new ‘@{profile_name}’ AppArmor variable, which is particularly handy with ptrace and signal rules. See man 5 apparmor.d for more details and examples.

14.10

Work still remains and some of the things we’d like to do for 14.10 include:

• Finishing mediation for non-networking forms of IPC (eg, abstract sockets). This will be done in time for the phone release.
• Have services integrate with AppArmor and the upcoming trust-store to become trusted helpers (also for phone release)
• Continue work on netowrking IPC (for 15.04)
• Continue to work with the upstream kernel on kdbus
• Work continued on LXC stacking and we hope to have stacked profiles within the current namespace for 14.10. Full support for stacked profiles where different host and container policy for the same binary at the same time should be ready by 15.04
• Various fixes to the python userspace tools for remaining bugs. These will also be backported to 14.04 LTS

Until next time, enjoy!