Messages in this thread | | | From | Florian Weimer <> | Subject | Re: Hard-coding PTY device node numbers in userspace | Date | Sun, 19 Feb 2017 16:35:12 +0100 |
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* Greg KH:
> On Fri, Feb 17, 2017 at 12:02:52PM +0100, Florian Weimer wrote: >> We want to reject PTY devices from other namespaces as valid input to >> the ttyname and ttyname_r functions, while still providing a hint to >> callers that the device is, in fact, a PTY. Christian Brauner wrote a >> glibc patch for this: >> >> <https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2017-01/msg00531.html> >> >> It hard-codes the major PTY device number range. Is this feasible? >> Is it part of the stable userspace ABI for the TTY subsystem? > > What major numbers are you using in the patch '2' and '3'?
I think there is just one patch, and the check looks like this:
static inline int is_pty (struct stat64 *sb) { int m = major (sb->st_rdev); return (136 <= m && m <= 143); }
> And yes, > major numbers are static and you should be fine to rely on them. But > can't you test that the device is a pty to verify it?
It's not entirely clear what exactly a PTY descriptor should be for ttyname. Going forward, we only want to treat descriptors for PTY devices which can be accessed using /dev/pts paths in the current namespace as PTYs. Christian's patch adds a separate error code for the case where the descriptor is a PTY, but it comes from a different namespace.
I'm concerned that some software out there assumes that if standard input is a PTY according to ttyname, it is safe to chown it. There have been security issues related to that a long time ago on some UNIX systems, and I want us to be conservative here.
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