VFS: make notify_change pass ATTR_KILL_S*ID to setattr operations

When an unprivileged process attempts to modify a file that has the setuid or
setgid bits set, the VFS will attempt to clear these bits.  The VFS will set
the ATTR_KILL_SUID or ATTR_KILL_SGID bits in the ia_valid mask, and then call
notify_change to clear these bits and set the mode accordingly.

With a networked filesystem (NFS and CIFS in particular but likely others),
the client machine or process may not have credentials that allow for setting
the mode.  In some situations, this can lead to file corruption, an operation
failing outright because the setattr fails, or to races that lead to a mode
change being reverted.

In this situation, we'd like to just leave the handling of this to the server
and ignore these bits.  The problem is that by the time the setattr op is
called, the VFS has already reinterpreted the ATTR_KILL_* bits into a mode
change.  The setattr operation has no way to know its intent.

The following patch fixes this by making notify_change no longer clear the
ATTR_KILL_SUID and ATTR_KILL_SGID bits in the ia_valid before handing it off
to the setattr inode op.  setattr can then check for the presence of these
bits, and if they're set it can assume that the mode change was only for the
purposes of clearing these bits.

This means that we now have an implicit assumption that notify_change is never
called with ATTR_MODE and either ATTR_KILL_S*ID bit set.  Nothing currently
enforces that, so this patch also adds a BUG() if that occurs.

Signed-off-by: Jeff Layton <jlayton@redhat.com>
Cc: Michael Halcrow <mhalcrow@us.ibm.com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Cc: Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de>
Cc: "J. Bruce Fields" <bfields@fieldses.org>
Cc: Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com>
Cc: Jeff Mahoney <jeffm@suse.com>
Cc: "Vladimir V. Saveliev" <vs@namesys.com>
Cc: Josef 'Jeff' Sipek <jsipek@cs.sunysb.edu>
Cc: Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no>
Cc: Steven French <sfrench@us.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
1 file changed