capabilities: Introduce CAP_CHECKPOINT_RESTORE

This patch introduces CAP_CHECKPOINT_RESTORE, a new capability facilitating
checkpoint/restore for non-root users.

Over the last years, The CRIU (Checkpoint/Restore In Userspace) team has
been asked numerous times if it is possible to checkpoint/restore a
process as non-root. The answer usually was: 'almost'.

The main blocker to restore a process as non-root was to control the PID
of the restored process. This feature available via the clone3 system
call, or via /proc/sys/kernel/ns_last_pid is unfortunately guarded by
CAP_SYS_ADMIN.

In the past two years, requests for non-root checkpoint/restore have
increased due to the following use cases:
* Checkpoint/Restore in an HPC environment in combination with a
  resource manager distributing jobs where users are always running as
  non-root. There is a desire to provide a way to checkpoint and
  restore long running jobs.
* Container migration as non-root
* We have been in contact with JVM developers who are integrating
  CRIU into a Java VM to decrease the startup time. These
  checkpoint/restore applications are not meant to be running with
  CAP_SYS_ADMIN.

We have seen the following workarounds:
* Use a setuid wrapper around CRIU:
  See https://github.com/FredHutch/slurm-examples/blob/master/checkpointer/lib/checkpointer/checkpointer-suid.c
* Use a setuid helper that writes to ns_last_pid.
  Unfortunately, this helper delegation technique is impossible to use
  with clone3, and is thus prone to races.
  See https://github.com/twosigma/set_ns_last_pid
* Cycle through PIDs with fork() until the desired PID is reached:
  This has been demonstrated to work with cycling rates of 100,000 PIDs/s
  See https://github.com/twosigma/set_ns_last_pid
* Patch out the CAP_SYS_ADMIN check from the kernel
* Run the desired application in a new user and PID namespace to provide
  a local CAP_SYS_ADMIN for controlling PIDs. This technique has limited
  use in typical container environments (e.g., Kubernetes) as /proc is
  typically protected with read-only layers (e.g., /proc/sys) for
  hardening purposes. Read-only layers prevent additional /proc mounts
  (due to proc's SB_I_USERNS_VISIBLE property), making the use of new
  PID namespaces limited as certain applications need access to /proc
  matching their PID namespace.

The introduced capability allows to:
* Control PIDs when the current user is CAP_CHECKPOINT_RESTORE capable
  for the corresponding PID namespace via ns_last_pid/clone3.
* Open files in /proc/pid/map_files when the current user is
  CAP_CHECKPOINT_RESTORE capable in the root namespace, useful for
  recovering files that are unreachable via the file system such as
  deleted files, or memfd files.

See corresponding selftest for an example with clone3().

Signed-off-by: Adrian Reber <areber@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Nicolas Viennot <Nicolas.Viennot@twosigma.com>
Reviewed-by: Serge Hallyn <serge@hallyn.com>
Acked-by: Christian Brauner <christian.brauner@ubuntu.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20200719100418.2112740-2-areber@redhat.com
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <christian.brauner@ubuntu.com>

1 files changed, 8 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/include/uapi/linux/capability.h b/include/uapi/linux/capability.h
index 48ff0757ae5e..395dd0df8d08 100644
--- a/include/uapi/linux/capability.h
+++ b/include/uapi/linux/capability.h
@@ -408,7 +408,14 @@ struct vfs_ns_cap_data {
  */
 #define CAP_BPF			39
 
-#define CAP_LAST_CAP         CAP_BPF
+
+/* Allow checkpoint/restore related operations */
+/* Allow PID selection during clone3() */
+/* Allow writing to ns_last_pid */
+
+#define CAP_CHECKPOINT_RESTORE	40
+
+#define CAP_LAST_CAP         CAP_CHECKPOINT_RESTORE
 
 #define cap_valid(x) ((x) >= 0 && (x) <= CAP_LAST_CAP)