Open Stack

On Fri, Nov 11, 2016 at 07:11:51PM -0600, Matt Riedemann wrote:
> Chris Friesen reported a bug [1] where injected files on a server aren't in
> the guest after it's evacuated to another compute host. This is because the
> injected files aren't persisted in the nova database at all. Evacuate and
> rebuild use similar code paths, but rebuild is a user operation and the
> command line is similar to boot, but evacuate is an admin operation and the
> admin doesn't have the original injected files.
> 
> We've talked about issues with file injection before [2] - in that case not
> being able to tell if it can be honored and it just silently doesn't inject
> the files but the server build doesn't fail. We could eventually resolve
> that with capabilities discovery in the API.
> 
> There are other issues with file injection, like potential security issues,
> and we've talked about getting rid of it for years because you can use the
> config drive.
> 
> The metadata service is not a replacement, as noted in the code [3], because
> the files aren't persisted in nova so they can't be served up later.
> 
> I'm sure we've talked about this before, but if we were to seriously
> consider deprecating file injection, what does that look like?  Thoughts off
> the top of my head are:
> 
> 1. Add a microversion to the server create and rebuild REST APIs such that
> the personality files aren't accepted unless:
> 
> a) you're also building the server with a config drive
> b) or CONF.force_config_drive is True
> c) or the image has the 'img_config_drive=mandatory' property
> 
> 2. Deprecate VFSLocalFS in Ocata for removal in Pike. That means libguestfs
> is required. We'd do this because I think VFSLocalFS is the one with
> potential security issues.

Yes, VFSLocalFS is the dangerous one if used with untrustworthy disk images
(essentially all public cloud images are untrustworth) because malicious
images could be used to exploit bugs in the host kernels' filesystem drivers.
This isn't theoretical - we've seen bugs in popular linux filesystems (ie
ext3) lie mistakenly unfixed for years https://lwn.net/Articles/538898/

Regards,
Daniel
-- 
|: http://berrange.com      -o-    http://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange/ :|
|: http://libvirt.org              -o-             http://virt-manager.org :|
|: http://entangle-photo.org       -o-    http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :|