Re: [PATCH 1/2] fs/exec: allow to unshare a time namespace on vfork+exec

[Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>]

On Sun, Jun 12, 2022 at 11:07:22PM -0700, Andrei Vagin wrote:
> Right now, a new process can't be forked in another time namespace
> if it shares mm with its parent. It is prohibited, because each time
> namespace has its own vvar page that is mapped into a process address
> space.
> 
> When a process calls exec, it gets a new mm and so it could be "legal"
> to switch time namespace in that case. This was not implemented and
> now if we want to do this, we need to add another clone flag to not
> break backward compatibility.
> 
> We don't have any user requests to switch times on exec except the
> vfork+exec combination, so there is no reason to add a new clone flag.
> As for vfork+exec, this should be safe to allow switching timens with
> the current clone flag. Right now, vfork (CLONE_VFORK | CLONE_VM) fails
> if a child is forked into another time namespace. With this change,
> vfork creates a new process in parent's timens, and the following exec
> does the actual switch to the target time namespace.

This seems like a very special case. None of the other namespaces do
this, do they?

How is CLONE_NEWTIME supposed to be used today?

-Kees

-- 
Kees Cook