Previously we'd used the existance of a specific AF_UNIX socket in the
abstract namespace as lock for disabling lookup recursions. (for
breaking out of the loop: userdb synthesized from nss → nss synthesized
from userdb → userdb synthesized from nss → …)
I did it like that because it promised to work the same both in static
and in dynmically linked environments and is accessible easily from any
programming language.
However, it has a weakness regarding reuse attacks: the socket is
securely hashed (siphash) from the thread ID in combination with the
AT_RANDOM secret. Thus it should not be guessable from an attacker in
advance. That's only true if a thread takes the lock only once and
keeps it forever. However, if a thread takes and releases it multiple
times an attacker might monitor that and quickly take the lock
after the first iteration for follow-up iterations.
It's not a big issue given that userdb (as the primary user for this)
never released the lock and we never made the concept a public
interface, and it was only included in one release so far, but it's
something that deserves fixing. (moreover it's a local DoS only, only
permitting to disable native userdb lookups)
With this rework the libnss_systemd.so.2 module will now export two
additional symbols. These symbols are not used by glibc, but can be used
by arbitrary programs: one can be used to disable nss-systemd, the other
to check if it is currently disabled.
The lock is per-thread. It's slightly less pretty, since it requires
people to manually link against C code via dlopen()/dlsym(), but it
should work safely without the aforementioned weakness.
This reworks the user validation infrastructure. There are now two
modes. In regular mode we are strict and test against a strict set of
valid chars. And in "relaxed" mode we just filter out some really
obvious, dangerous stuff. i.e. strict is whitelisting what is OK, but
"relaxed" is blacklisting what is really not OK.
The idea is that we use strict mode whenver we allocate a new user
(i.e. in sysusers.d or homed), while "relaxed" mode is when we process
users registered elsewhere, (i.e. userdb, logind, …)
The requirements on user name validity vary wildly. SSSD thinks its fine
to embedd "@" for example, while the suggested NAME_REGEX field on
Debian does not even allow uppercase chars…
This effectively liberaralizes a lot what we expect from usernames.
The code that warns about questionnable user names is now optional and
only used at places such as unit file parsing, so that it doesn't show
up on every userdb query, but only when processing configuration files
that know better.
Fixes: #15149#15090
This prevents an error in pam_systemd when logging in.
sshd[2623165]: pam_unix(sshd:session): session opened for user tony.stark(uid=10001) by (uid=0)
sshd[2623165]: pam_systemd(sshd:session): Failed to get user record: Invalid argument
Bug: https://bugs.gentoo.org/708824
