[Python-Dev] PEP 578: Python Runtime Audit Hooks (original) (raw)

Christian Heimes christian at python.org
Sun Mar 31 08:38:38 EDT 2019

On 29/03/2019 21.10, Steve Dower wrote:

For example how does the importhook work in regarding of alternative importers like zipimport? What does the import hook 'see' for an import from a zipfile? Yes, good point. I think opening the zip file with openforimport() is the right place to do it, as this operation relates to opening the file on disk rather than files within it.

+1

Shared libraries are trickier. libc doesn't define a way to dlopen() from a file descriptor. dlopen() takes a file name, but a file name leaves the audit hook open to a TOCTOU attack. For Windows, at least, the operating system can run its own validation on native modules (if you're using a feature like DeviceGuard, for example), so the hook likely isn't necessary for those purposes. I believe some configurations of Linux allow this as well? But there's likely no better option here than a combination of good ACLs and checking by filename, which at least lets you whitelist the files you know you want to allow. Similarly for the zip file - if you trust a particular file and trust your ACLs, checking by filename is fine. That said, specific audit events for "I'm about to open this zip/dlopen this file for import" are very easy to add. (The PEP proposes many examples, but is not trying to be exhaustive. If accepted, we should feel free to add new events as we identify places where they matter.)

The Linux effort is called Integrity Measurement Architecture (IMA) and Linux Extended Verification Module (EVM). I have no practical experience with IMA yet.

I don't like the fact that the PEP requires users to learn and use an additional layer to handle native code. Although we cannot provide a fully secure hook for native code, we could at least try to provide a best effort hook and document the limitations. A bit more information would make the verified open function more useful, too.

PyObject *PyImport_OpenForExecution( const char *path, const char *intent, int flags, PyObject *context )

Examples:

PyImport_OpenForImport( '/usr/lib64/python3.7/pycache/os.cpython-37.pyc', 'bytecode', PY_IMPORT_OPENFILE, SourceFileLoader_instance ) -> fileobject

PyImport_OpenForImport( '/lib64/libc.so.6', 'ctypes', PY_IMPORT_NONE, NULL ) -> None

Aside: an important aspect of this per-file approach to execution is that the idea is generally to enable the files you trust, rather than disable the files that are bad. So the detection routines are typically "does this match a known hash" or "is this in a secure location", which for a carefully deployed system are already known values, rather than trying to figure out whether a file might do a bad thing. If you can't validate the files in your deployment match the ones you thought you were deploying, you are so far from needing this that it doesn't even matter, but most of the deployments I work with are at least this well controlled.

Absolutely!

On Linux, trust settings could be stored in extended file attributes. Linux has multiple namespaces for extended attributes. User attributes can be modified by every process that has write permission to an inode. The security namespace is only writable for processes with CAP_SYS_ADMIN. A secure loader could check for presence of 'user.org.python.bytecode' attribute or compare the content of the file to hashsum in 'security.org.python.bytecode.sha256'.

Christian

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