This uses the new request_module_cap() facility to directly propagate CAP_NET_ADMIN capability and the 'netdev' module prefix to the capability subsystem as it was suggested.
We do not remove the explicit capable(CAP_NET_ADMIN) check here, but we may remove it in future versions since it is also performed by the capability subsystem. This allows to have a better interface where other subsystems will just use this call and let the capability subsystem handles the permission checks, if the modules should be loaded or not. This is also an infrastructure fix since historically Linux always allowed to auto-load modules without privileges, and later the net code started to check capabilities and prefixes, adapted the CAP_NET_ADMIN check with the 'netdev' prefix to prevent abusing the capability by loading non-netdev modules. However from a bigger picture we want to continue to support automatic module loading as non privileged but also implement easy policy solutions like: User=djalal DenyNewFeatures=no Which will translate to allow the interactive user djalal to load extra Linux features. Others, volatile accounts or guests can be easily blocked from doing so. We have introduced in previous patches the necessary infrastructure and now with this change we start to use the new request_module_cap() function to explicitly tell the capability subsystem that we want to auto-load modules with CAP_NET_ADMIN if they are prefixed. This is also based on suggestions from Rusty Russel and Kees Cook [1] [1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/4/26/735 Cc: Ben Hutchings <ben.hutchi...@codethink.co.uk> Cc: James Morris <james.l.mor...@oracle.com> Cc: Serge Hallyn <se...@hallyn.com> Cc: Solar Designer <so...@openwall.com> Cc: Andy Lutomirski <l...@kernel.org> Suggested-by: Rusty Russell <ru...@rustcorp.com.au> Suggested-by: Kees Cook <keesc...@chromium.org> Signed-off-by: Djalal Harouni <tix...@gmail.com> --- net/core/dev_ioctl.c | 4 +++- 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/net/core/dev_ioctl.c b/net/core/dev_ioctl.c index 7e690d0..fdd8560 100644 --- a/net/core/dev_ioctl.c +++ b/net/core/dev_ioctl.c @@ -382,8 +382,10 @@ void dev_load(struct net *net, const char *name) rcu_read_unlock(); no_module = !dev; + /* "netdev-%s" modules are allowed if CAP_NET_ADMIN is set */ if (no_module && capable(CAP_NET_ADMIN)) - no_module = request_module("netdev-%s", name); + no_module = request_module_cap(CAP_NET_ADMIN, "netdev", + "%s", name); if (no_module && capable(CAP_SYS_MODULE)) request_module("%s", name); } -- 2.7.4
