[Devel] mounts & namespaces

[Michael Tokarev]

Hello.

I asked similar question on lxc-devel@ but got no reply.  Since
the issue is in kernel entirely, I'm asking in containers@ now.

As a base, I used lxc utils.

First of all, I'm concerned about file namespace security in a
container.  It is, basically, just a chroot(2), or at least it
looks like that to me.  But as we know, root can break out of
chroot.  Are there any protection methods that prevents this
break-out?

I see lxc-start performs one additional rbind-mount - whole root
filesystem of a container to a temporary directory (mktemp), and
uses that temp dir as root for the container.  I wonder what it
is trying to achieve this way.  Is it related to the first
question and prevents breaking out of chroot somehow?

On a similar note, can pivot_root be used there instead of a chroot?
But see below for this one.

Inside a container, /proc/mounts is a complete mess, since most
paths are not accessible (out of chroot).  When using real
/etc/mtab things become much nicer, but mtab has been made a
link to /proc/mounts for a purpose.

So I wonder if we can clean that stuff up for real.  I mean, not
/proc/mounts by itself but the namespace.  For that, using
pivot_root instead of a chroot to keep other filesystems
available directly, and umount all of them which are not
useful.  I understand it is not always possible (you can't
umount /oldroot/usr as long as /oldroot/usr/containerroot
is bind-mounted to /), but I think it's worth to try, at
least in cases where it is doable (maybe not for general
utils but in custom use-case).

But before trying, I want to understand the security
implicatins and the whole root barrier thing if any --
see my first question.

Thanks!

/mjt
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