Making Linux Protection Mechanisms Egalitarian with Userfs
Making Linux Protection Mechanisms Egalitarian with UserFS Taesoo Kim and Nickolai Zeldovich MIT CSAIL ABSTRACT firewall rules, forcing applications to invent their own UserFS provides egalitarian OS protection mechanisms protection techniques like system call interposition [15], in Linux. UserFS allows any user—not just the system binary rewriting [30] or analysis [13, 45], or interposing administrator—to allocate Unix user IDs, to use chroot, on system accesses in a language runtime like Javascript. and to set up firewall rules in order to confine untrusted This paper presents the design of UserFS, a kernel code. One key idea in UserFS is representing user IDs as framework that allows any application to use traditional files in a /proc-like file system, thus allowing applica- OS protection mechanisms on a Unix system, and a proto- tions to manage user IDs like any other files, by setting type implementation of UserFS for Linux. UserFS makes permissions and passing file descriptors over Unix do- protection mechanisms egalitarian, so that any user—not main sockets. UserFS addresses several challenges in just the system administrator—can allocate new user IDs, making user IDs egalitarian, including accountability, re- set up firewall rules, and isolate processes using chroot. source allocation, persistence, and UID reuse. We have By using the operating system’s own protection mecha- ported several applications to take advantage of UserFS; nisms, applications can avoid race conditions and ambi- by changing just tens to hundreds of lines of code, we guities associated with system call interposition [14, 43], prevented attackers from exploiting application-level vul- can confine existing code without having to recompile or nerabilities, such as code injection or missing ACL checks rewrite it in a new language, and can enforce a coherent in a PHP-based wiki application.
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