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  • Christian Brauner's avatar
    fhandle: relax open_by_handle_at() permission checks · 620c266f
    Christian Brauner authored
    A current limitation of open_by_handle_at() is that it's currently not possible
    to use it from within containers at all because we require CAP_DAC_READ_SEARCH
    in the initial namespace. That's unfortunate because there are scenarios where
    using open_by_handle_at() from within containers.
    
    Two examples:
    
    (1) cgroupfs allows to encode cgroups to file handles and reopen them with
        open_by_handle_at().
    (2) Fanotify allows placing filesystem watches they currently aren't usable in
        containers because the returned file handles cannot be used.
    
    Here's a proposal for relaxing the permission check for open_by_handle_at().
    
    (1) Opening file handles when the caller has privileges over the filesystem
        (1.1) The caller has an unobstructed view of the filesystem.
        (1.2) The caller has permissions to follow a path to the file handle.
    
    This doesn't address the problem of opening a file handle when only a portion
    of a filesystem is exposed as is common in con...
    620c266f