In my last article I looked at the seccomp notifier in detail and how it allows us to make unprivileged containers way more capable (Sorry, kernel joke.). This is the (very) crazy (but very short) sequel. (Sorry Jon, no novella this time. :))

Last time I mentioned two new features that we had landed:

1. Retrieving file descriptors from another task via pidfd_getfd()
2. Injection file descriptors via the new SECCOMP_IOCTL_NOTIF_ADDFD ioctl on the seccomp notifier

The 2. feature just landed in the merge window for v5.9. So what better time than now to boot a v5.9 pre-rc1 kernel and play with the new features.

I said that these features make it possible to intercept syscalls that return file descriptors or that pass file descriptors to the kernel. Syscalls that come to mind are open(), connect(), dup2(), but also bpf(). People that read the first blogpost might not have realized how crazy^serious one can get with these two new features so I thought it be a good exercise to illustrate it. And what better victim than bpf().

As we know, bpf() and unprivileged containers don’t get along too well. But that doesn’t need to be the case. For the demo you’re about to see I enabled LXD to supervise the bpf() syscalls for tasks running in unprivileged containers. We will intercept the bpf() syscalls for the BPF_PROG_LOAD command for BPF_PROG_TYPE_CGROUP_DEVICE program types and the BPF_PROG_ATTACH, and BPF_PROG_DETACH commands for the BPF_CGROUP_DEVICE attach type. This allows a nested unprivileged container to load its own device profile in the cgroup2 hierarchy.

This is just a tiny glimpse into how this can be used and extended. ;) The pull request for LXD is already up here. Let’s see if the rest of the team thinks I’m going crazy. :)