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getcwd.3: behavior for unreachable cwd

PATCH In review Jann Horn 2 participants 2 messages Apr 5, 2015 – Apr 6, 2015 1 message not in the archive Man-pages: manual pages for Linux -- Sections 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7

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Jann Horn

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#0 lore raw

PATCH 1/1 getcwd.3: behavior for unreachable cwd

For the code that does this, see fs/dcache.c, search for "prepend_unreachable".

repro testcase:

$ cat getcwd.c
#define _GNU_SOURCE
#include <sched.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <limits.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main(void) {
unshare(CLONE_NEWUSER | CLONE_NEWNS);
chdir("/usr");
chroot("bin");

  printf("current directory: \"%s\"\n", get_current_dir_name());

  char *real = realpath(".", NULL);
  printf("realpath of .: \"%s\"\n", real ? real : "{none}");
  real = realpath("../home/jann/.ssh", NULL);
  printf("realpath of path: \"%s\"\n", real ? real : "{none}");

return 0;
}

$ cat getcwd_test.c
#define _GNU_SOURCE
#include <sched.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
unshare(CLONE_NEWUSER | CLONE_NEWNS);
chdir("/usr");
chroot("bin");
printf("current directory: \"%s\"\n", get_current_dir_name()); return 0;
}

$ gcc -o getcwd_test getcwd_test.c -Wall
$ ./getcwd_test
current directory: "(unreachable)/usr"

realpath.3 doesn't currently seem to handle this case in a sane way, so I'm not going to document its behavior yet. I'll report that as a bug instead.

---
 man3/getcwd.3 | 13 +++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 13 insertions(+)
man3/getcwd.3 +13 -0
index a1f7e2a..6a98b82 100644
@@ -80,6 +80,19 @@ The pathname is returned as the function result and via the argument
 .IR buf ,
 if present.
 
+If the current directory is not below the root directory of the current
+process (e.g. because the process set a new filesystem root
+using
+.BR chroot (2)
+without changing its current directory into the new root), the returned
+path will be prefixed with the string "(unreachable)". Such behavior can
+also be caused by an unprivileged user by changing the current directory
+into another mount namespace.
+When dealing with paths from untrusted sources, callers of these
+functions should consider checking whether the returned path starts
+with '/' or '(' to avoid misinterpreting an unreachable path
+as a relative path.
+
 The
 .BR getcwd ()
 function copies an absolute pathname of the current working directory
Signature · 1 line
2.1.4

A message that is not in the archive (sent off-list or not yet received): 20150405154448.GA18678-J1fxOzX/[email protected]

#2 lore raw

Hi Jann,

Quoted 2 lines · Jann Horn

For the code that does this, see fs/dcache.c, search for "prepend_unreachable".

Thanks! Great patch! And thanks also for including the test code.

I added one detail: this behavior was added in 2.6.36. Generally, it's useful to include the version where a behavior appeared. Also, I added the commit hash into the page source as a comment (that's often handy for future reference when editing the pages). See my commit 2b1f1a35b5 [1].

Cheers,

Michael

[1] http://git.kernel.org/cgit/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/commit/?id=2b1f1a35b5f2d21fd6653b4cd4cb93f095e4b398

Quoted 73 lines

repro testcase:

$ cat getcwd.c
#define _GNU_SOURCE
#include <sched.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <limits.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main(void) {
unshare(CLONE_NEWUSER | CLONE_NEWNS);
chdir("/usr");
chroot("bin");

  printf("current directory: \"%s\"\n", get_current_dir_name());

  char *real = realpath(".", NULL);
  printf("realpath of .: \"%s\"\n", real ? real : "{none}");
  real = realpath("../home/jann/.ssh", NULL);
  printf("realpath of path: \"%s\"\n", real ? real : "{none}");

return 0;
}

$ cat getcwd_test.c
#define _GNU_SOURCE
#include <sched.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
unshare(CLONE_NEWUSER | CLONE_NEWNS);
chdir("/usr");
chroot("bin");
printf("current directory: \"%s\"\n", get_current_dir_name()); return 0;
}

$ gcc -o getcwd_test getcwd_test.c -Wall
$ ./getcwd_test
current directory: "(unreachable)/usr"

realpath.3 doesn't currently seem to handle this case in a sane way, so I'm not going to document its behavior yet. I'll report that as a bug instead.

---
 man3/getcwd.3 | 13 +++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 13 insertions(+)
man3/getcwd.3 +13 -0
index a1f7e2a..6a98b82 100644
@@ -80,6 +80,19 @@ The pathname is returned as the function result and via the argument
 .IR buf ,
 if present.
 
+If the current directory is not below the root directory of the current
+process (e.g. because the process set a new filesystem root
+using
+.BR chroot (2)
+without changing its current directory into the new root), the returned
+path will be prefixed with the string "(unreachable)". Such behavior can
+also be caused by an unprivileged user by changing the current directory
+into another mount namespace.
+When dealing with paths from untrusted sources, callers of these
+functions should consider checking whether the returned path starts
+with '/' or '(' to avoid misinterpreting an unreachable path
+as a relative path.
+
 The
 .BR getcwd ()
 function copies an absolute pathname of the current working directory
Signature · 7 lines
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/
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