Re: [PATCH] host/roots: Sandbox xdg-desktop-portal-spectrum-host

Alyssa Ross
2025-12-14T01:39:21Z

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Demi Marie Obenour <demiobenour@gmail.com> writes:

> On 12/13/25 16:42, Alyssa Ross wrote:
>> Demi Marie Obenour <demiobenour@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> On 12/13/25 14:12, Alyssa Ross wrote:
>>>> Demi Marie Obenour <demiobenour@gmail.com> writes:
>>>>
>>>>> It is quite possible that these Landlock rules are unnecessarily
>>>>> permissive, but all of the paths to which read and execute access is
>>>>> granted are part of the root filesystem and therefore assumed to be
>>>>> public knowledge. Removing access from any of them would only increase
>>>>> the risk of accidental breakage in the future, and would not provide any
>>>>> security improvements. seccomp *could* provide some improvements, but
>>>>> the effort needed is too high for now.
>>>>>
>>>>> Signed-off-by: Demi Marie Obenour <demiobenour@gmail.com>
>>>>> ---
>>>>> .../template/data/service/xdg-desktop-portal-spectrum-host/run | 8 ++++++++
>>>>> 1 file changed, 8 insertions(+)
>>>>
>>>> Are you sure this is working as intended? There's no rule allowing
>>>> access to Cloud Hypervisor's VSOCK socket, and yet it still seems to be
>>>> able to access that. Don't you need to set a rule that *restricts*
>>>> filesystem access and then add holes? Did you ever see this deny
>>>> anything?
>>>
>>> 'man 1 setpriv' states that '--landlock-access fs' blocks all
>>> filesystem access unless a subsequent --landlock-rule permits it.
>>> I tried running with no --landlock-rule flags and the execve of
>>> xdg-desktop-portal-spectrum-host failed as expected.
>>>
>>> The socket is passed over stdin, and I'm pretty sure Landlock
>>> doesn't restrict using an already-open file descriptor.
>>> xdg-desktop-portal-spectrum-host does need to find the path to the
>>> socket, but I don't think it ever accesses that path.
>>
>> I've been looking into this a bit myself, and from what I can tell
>> Landlock just doesn't restrict connecting to sockets at all, even if
>> they're inside directories that would otherwise be inaccessible. It's
>> able to connect to both Cloud Hypervisor's VSOCK socket and the D-Bus
>> socket even with a maximally restrictive landlock rule. So you were
>> right after all, sorry!
>
> That's not good at all! It's a trivial sandbox escape in so many cases.
> For instance, with access to D-Bus I can just call `systemd-run`.
>
> I'm CCing the Landlock and LSM mailing lists because if you are
> correct, then this is a bad security hole.

I don't find it that surprising given the way landlock works. "connect"
(to a non-abstract AF_UNIX socket) is not an operation there's a
landlock action for, and it's not like the other actions care about
access to parent directories and the like — I was able to execute a
program via a symlink after only giving access to the symlink's target,
without any access to the directory containing the symlink or the
symlink itself, for example. Landlock, as I understand it, is intended
to block a specified set of operations (on particular file hierarchies),
rather than to completely prevent access to those hierarchies like
permissions or mount namespaces could, so the lack of a way to block
connecting to a socket is more of a missing feature than a security
hole.

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