landlock(7) — Linux manual page

NAME | DESCRIPTION | VERSIONS | NOTES | CAVEATS | EXAMPLES | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON

Landlock(7)         Miscellaneous Information Manual         Landlock(7)

NAME         top

       Landlock - unprivileged access-control

DESCRIPTION         top

       Landlock is an access-control system that enables any processes
       to securely restrict themselves and their future children.
       Because Landlock is a stackable Linux Security Module (LSM), it
       makes it possible to create safe security sandboxes as new
       security layers in addition to the existing system-wide access-
       controls.  This kind of sandbox is expected to help mitigate the
       security impact of bugs, and unexpected or malicious behaviors in
       applications.

       A Landlock security policy is a set of access rights (e.g., open
       a file in read-only, make a directory, etc.)  tied to a file
       hierarchy.  Such policy can be configured and enforced by
       processes for themselves using three system calls:

       •  landlock_create_ruleset(2) creates a new ruleset;

       •  landlock_add_rule(2) adds a new rule to a ruleset;

       •  landlock_restrict_self(2) enforces a ruleset on the calling
          thread.

       To be able to use these system calls, the running kernel must
       support Landlock and it must be enabled at boot time.

   Landlock rules
       A Landlock rule describes an action on an object.  An object is
       currently a file hierarchy, and the related filesystem actions
       are defined with access rights (see landlock_add_rule(2)).  A set
       of rules is aggregated in a ruleset, which can then restrict the
       thread enforcing it, and its future children.

   Filesystem actions
       These flags enable to restrict a sandboxed process to a set of
       actions on files and directories.  Files or directories opened
       before the sandboxing are not subject to these restrictions.  See
       landlock_add_rule(2) and landlock_create_ruleset(2) for more
       context.

       A file can only receive these access rights:

       LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_EXECUTE
              Execute a file.

       LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_WRITE_FILE
              Open a file with write access.

              When opening files for writing, you will often
              additionally need the LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_TRUNCATE right.
              In many cases, these system calls truncate existing files
              when overwriting them (e.g., creat(2)).

       LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_READ_FILE
              Open a file with read access.

       LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_TRUNCATE
              Truncate a file with truncate(2), ftruncate(2), creat(2),
              or open(2) with O_TRUNC.  Whether an opened file can be
              truncated with ftruncate(2) is determined during open(2),
              in the same way as read and write permissions are checked
              during open(2) using LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_READ_FILE and
              LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_WRITE_FILE.  This access right is
              available since the third version of the Landlock ABI.

       A directory can receive access rights related to files or
       directories.  The following access right is applied to the
       directory itself, and the directories beneath it:

       LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_READ_DIR
              Open a directory or list its content.

       However, the following access rights only apply to the content of
       a directory, not the directory itself:

       LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_REMOVE_DIR
              Remove an empty directory or rename one.

       LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_REMOVE_FILE
              Unlink (or rename) a file.

       LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_MAKE_CHAR
              Create (or rename or link) a character device.

       LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_MAKE_DIR
              Create (or rename) a directory.

       LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_MAKE_REG
              Create (or rename or link) a regular file.

       LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_MAKE_SOCK
              Create (or rename or link) a UNIX domain socket.

       LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_MAKE_FIFO
              Create (or rename or link) a named pipe.

       LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_MAKE_BLOCK
              Create (or rename or link) a block device.

       LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_MAKE_SYM
              Create (or rename or link) a symbolic link.

       LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_REFER
              Link or rename a file from or to a different directory
              (i.e., reparent a file hierarchy).

              This access right is available since the second version of
              the Landlock ABI.

              This is the only access right which is denied by default
              by any ruleset, even if the right is not specified as
              handled at ruleset creation time.  The only way to make a
              ruleset grant this right is to explicitly allow it for a
              specific directory by adding a matching rule to the
              ruleset.

              In particular, when using the first Landlock ABI version,
              Landlock will always deny attempts to reparent files
              between different directories.

              In addition to the source and destination directories
              having the LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_REFER access right, the
              attempted link or rename operation must meet the following
              constraints:

              •  The reparented file may not gain more access rights in
                 the destination directory than it previously had in the
                 source directory.  If this is attempted, the operation
                 results in an EXDEV error.

              •  When linking or renaming, the LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_MAKE_*
                 right for the respective file type must be granted for
                 the destination directory.  Otherwise, the operation
                 results in an EACCES error.

              •  When renaming, the LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_REMOVE_* right
                 for the respective file type must be granted for the
                 source directory.  Otherwise, the operation results in
                 an EACCES error.

              If multiple requirements are not met, the EACCES error
              code takes precedence over EXDEV.

   Layers of file path access rights
       Each time a thread enforces a ruleset on itself, it updates its
       Landlock domain with a new layer of policy.  Indeed, this
       complementary policy is composed with the potentially other
       rulesets already restricting this thread.  A sandboxed thread can
       then safely add more constraints to itself with a new enforced
       ruleset.

       One policy layer grants access to a file path if at least one of
       its rules encountered on the path grants the access.  A sandboxed
       thread can only access a file path if all its enforced policy
       layers grant the access as well as all the other system access
       controls (e.g., filesystem DAC, other LSM policies, etc.).

   Bind mounts and OverlayFS
       Landlock enables restricting access to file hierarchies, which
       means that these access rights can be propagated with bind mounts
       (cf.  mount_namespaces(7)) but not with OverlayFS.

       A bind mount mirrors a source file hierarchy to a destination.
       The destination hierarchy is then composed of the exact same
       files, on which Landlock rules can be tied, either via the source
       or the destination path.  These rules restrict access when they
       are encountered on a path, which means that they can restrict
       access to multiple file hierarchies at the same time, whether
       these hierarchies are the result of bind mounts or not.

       An OverlayFS mount point consists of upper and lower layers.
       These layers are combined in a merge directory, result of the
       mount point.  This merge hierarchy may include files from the
       upper and lower layers, but modifications performed on the merge
       hierarchy only reflect on the upper layer.  From a Landlock
       policy point of view, each of the OverlayFS layers and merge
       hierarchies is standalone and contains its own set of files and
       directories, which is different from a bind mount.  A policy
       restricting an OverlayFS layer will not restrict the resulted
       merged hierarchy, and vice versa.  Landlock users should then
       only think about file hierarchies they want to allow access to,
       regardless of the underlying filesystem.

   Inheritance
       Every new thread resulting from a clone(2) inherits Landlock
       domain restrictions from its parent.  This is similar to the
       seccomp(2) inheritance or any other LSM dealing with tasks'
       credentials(7).  For instance, one process's thread may apply
       Landlock rules to itself, but they will not be automatically
       applied to other sibling threads (unlike POSIX thread credential
       changes, cf.  nptl(7)).

       When a thread sandboxes itself, we have the guarantee that the
       related security policy will stay enforced on all this thread's
       descendants.  This allows creating standalone and modular
       security policies per application, which will automatically be
       composed between themselves according to their run-time parent
       policies.

   Ptrace restrictions
       A sandboxed process has less privileges than a non-sandboxed
       process and must then be subject to additional restrictions when
       manipulating another process.  To be allowed to use ptrace(2) and
       related syscalls on a target process, a sandboxed process should
       have a subset of the target process rules, which means the tracee
       must be in a sub-domain of the tracer.

   Truncating files
       The operations covered by LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_WRITE_FILE and
       LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_TRUNCATE both change the contents of a file
       and sometimes overlap in non-intuitive ways.  It is recommended
       to always specify both of these together.

       A particularly surprising example is creat(2).  The name suggests
       that this system call requires the rights to create and write
       files.  However, it also requires the truncate right if an
       existing file under the same name is already present.

       It should also be noted that truncating files does not require
       the LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_WRITE_FILE right.  Apart from the
       truncate(2) system call, this can also be done through open(2)
       with the flags O_RDONLY | O_TRUNC.

       When opening a file, the availability of the
       LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_TRUNCATE right is associated with the newly
       created file descriptor and will be used for subsequent
       truncation attempts using ftruncate(2).  The behavior is similar
       to opening a file for reading or writing, where permissions are
       checked during open(2), but not during the subsequent read(2) and
       write(2) calls.

       As a consequence, it is possible to have multiple open file
       descriptors for the same file, where one grants the right to
       truncate the file and the other does not.  It is also possible to
       pass such file descriptors between processes, keeping their
       Landlock properties, even when these processes do not have an
       enforced Landlock ruleset.

VERSIONS         top

       Landlock was introduced in Linux 5.13.

       To determine which Landlock features are available, users should
       query the Landlock ABI version:
       ┌─────┬────────┬────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
       │ ABI Kernel Newly introduced access rights                 │
       ├─────┼────────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
       │  1  │  5.13  │ LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_EXECUTE                     │
       │     │        │ LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_WRITE_FILE                  │
       │     │        │ LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_READ_FILE                   │
       │     │        │ LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_READ_DIR                    │
       │     │        │ LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_REMOVE_DIR                  │
       │     │        │ LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_REMOVE_FILE                 │
       │     │        │ LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_MAKE_CHAR                   │
       │     │        │ LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_MAKE_DIR                    │
       │     │        │ LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_MAKE_REG                    │
       │     │        │ LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_MAKE_SOCK                   │
       │     │        │ LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_MAKE_FIFO                   │
       │     │        │ LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_MAKE_BLOCK                  │
       │     │        │ LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_MAKE_SYM                    │
       ├─────┼────────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
       │  2  │  5.19  │ LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_REFER                       │
       ├─────┼────────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
       │  3  │  6.2   │ LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_TRUNCATE                    │
       └─────┴────────┴────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

       Users should use the Landlock ABI version rather than the kernel
       version to determine which features are available.  The mainline
       kernel versions listed here are only included for orientation.
       Kernels from other sources may contain backported features, and
       their version numbers may not match.

       To query the running kernel's Landlock ABI version, programs may
       pass the LANDLOCK_CREATE_RULESET_VERSION flag to
       landlock_create_ruleset(2).

       When building fallback mechanisms for compatibility with older
       kernels, users are advised to consider the special semantics of
       the LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_REFER access right: In ABI v1, linking and
       moving of files between different directories is always
       forbidden, so programs relying on such operations are only
       compatible with Landlock ABI v2 and higher.

NOTES         top

       Landlock is enabled by CONFIG_SECURITY_LANDLOCK.  The
       lsm=lsm1,...,lsmN command line parameter controls the sequence of
       the initialization of Linux Security Modules.  It must contain
       the string landlock to enable Landlock.  If the command line
       parameter is not specified, the initialization falls back to the
       value of the deprecated security= command line parameter and
       further to the value of CONFIG_LSM.  We can check that Landlock
       is enabled by looking for landlock: Up and running.  in kernel
       logs.

CAVEATS         top

       It is currently not possible to restrict some file-related
       actions accessible through these system call families: chdir(2),
       stat(2), flock(2), chmod(2), chown(2), setxattr(2), utime(2),
       ioctl(2), fcntl(2), access(2).  Future Landlock evolutions will
       enable to restrict them.

EXAMPLES         top

       We first need to create the ruleset that will contain our rules.

       For this example, the ruleset will contain rules that only allow
       read actions, but write actions will be denied.  The ruleset then
       needs to handle both of these kinds of actions.  See the
       DESCRIPTION section for the description of filesystem actions.

           struct landlock_ruleset_attr attr = {0};
           int ruleset_fd;

           attr.handled_access_fs =
                   LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_EXECUTE |
                   LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_WRITE_FILE |
                   LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_READ_FILE |
                   LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_READ_DIR |
                   LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_REMOVE_DIR |
                   LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_REMOVE_FILE |
                   LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_MAKE_CHAR |
                   LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_MAKE_DIR |
                   LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_MAKE_REG |
                   LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_MAKE_SOCK |
                   LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_MAKE_FIFO |
                   LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_MAKE_BLOCK |
                   LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_MAKE_SYM |
                   LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_REFER |
                   LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_TRUNCATE;

       To be compatible with older Linux versions, we detect the
       available Landlock ABI version, and only use the available subset
       of access rights:

           /*
            * Table of available file system access rights by ABI version,
            * numbers hardcoded to keep the example short.
            */
           __u64 landlock_fs_access_rights[] = {
               (LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_MAKE_SYM << 1) - 1,  /* v1                 */
               (LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_REFER    << 1) - 1,  /* v2: add "refer"    */
               (LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_TRUNCATE << 1) - 1,  /* v3: add "truncate" */
           };

           int abi = landlock_create_ruleset(NULL, 0,
                                             LANDLOCK_CREATE_RULESET_VERSION);
           if (abi == -1) {
               /*
                * Kernel too old, not compiled with Landlock,
                * or Landlock was not enabled at boot time.
                */
               perror("Unable to use Landlock");
               return;  /* Graceful fallback: Do nothing. */
           }
           abi = MIN(abi, 3);

           /* Only use the available rights in the ruleset. */
           attr.handled_access_fs &= landlock_fs_access_rights[abi - 1];

       The available access rights for each ABI version are listed in
       the VERSIONS section.

       If our program needed to create hard links or rename files
       between different directories (LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_REFER), we
       would require the following change to the backwards compatibility
       logic: Directory reparenting is not possible in a process
       restricted with Landlock ABI version 1.  Therefore, if the
       program needed to do file reparenting, and if only Landlock ABI
       version 1 was available, we could not restrict the process.

       Now that the ruleset attributes are determined, we create the
       Landlock ruleset and acquire a file descriptor as a handle to it,
       using landlock_create_ruleset(2):

           ruleset_fd = landlock_create_ruleset(&attr, sizeof(attr), 0);
           if (ruleset_fd == -1) {
               perror("Failed to create a ruleset");
               exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
           }

       We can now add a new rule to the ruleset through the ruleset's
       file descriptor.  The requested access rights must be a subset of
       the access rights which were specified in attr.handled_access_fs
       at ruleset creation time.

       In this example, the rule will only allow reading the file
       hierarchy /usr.  Without another rule, write actions would then
       be denied by the ruleset.  To add /usr to the ruleset, we open it
       with the O_PATH flag and fill the struct
       landlock_path_beneath_attr with this file descriptor.

           struct landlock_path_beneath_attr path_beneath = {0};
           int err;

           path_beneath.allowed_access =
                   LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_EXECUTE |
                   LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_READ_FILE |
                   LANDLOCK_ACCESS_FS_READ_DIR;

           path_beneath.parent_fd = open("/usr", O_PATH | O_CLOEXEC);
           if (path_beneath.parent_fd == -1) {
               perror("Failed to open file");
               close(ruleset_fd);
               exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
           }
           err = landlock_add_rule(ruleset_fd, LANDLOCK_RULE_PATH_BENEATH,
                                   &path_beneath, 0);
           close(path_beneath.parent_fd);
           if (err) {
               perror("Failed to update ruleset");
               close(ruleset_fd);
               exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
           }

       We now have a ruleset with one rule allowing read access to /usr
       while denying all other handled accesses for the filesystem.  The
       next step is to restrict the current thread from gaining more
       privileges (e.g., thanks to a set-user-ID binary).

           if (prctl(PR_SET_NO_NEW_PRIVS, 1, 0, 0, 0)) {
               perror("Failed to restrict privileges");
               close(ruleset_fd);
               exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
           }

       The current thread is now ready to sandbox itself with the
       ruleset.

           if (landlock_restrict_self(ruleset_fd, 0)) {
               perror("Failed to enforce ruleset");
               close(ruleset_fd);
               exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
           }
           close(ruleset_fd);

       If the landlock_restrict_self(2) system call succeeds, the
       current thread is now restricted and this policy will be enforced
       on all its subsequently created children as well.  Once a thread
       is landlocked, there is no way to remove its security policy;
       only adding more restrictions is allowed.  These threads are now
       in a new Landlock domain, merge of their parent one (if any) with
       the new ruleset.

       Full working code can be found in 
       ⟨https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git/tree/samples/landlock/sandboxer.c

SEE ALSO         top

       landlock_create_ruleset(2), landlock_add_rule(2),
       landlock_restrict_self(2)https://landlock.io/

COLOPHON         top

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Linux man-pages 6.9.1          2024-05-02                    Landlock(7)

Pages that refer to this page: setpriv(1)landlock_add_rule(2)landlock_create_ruleset(2)landlock_restrict_self(2)