Bug 895105

Summary:	libcap-ng should handle cap_last_cap changes
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Andy Lutomirski <luto>
Component:	libcap-ng	Assignee:	Steve Grubb <sgrubb>
Status:	CLOSED CURRENTRELEASE	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	unspecified	Docs Contact:
Priority:	unspecified
Version:	rawhide	CC:	mschmidt, sgrubb
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Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
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Last Closed:	2014-05-01 02:37:12 UTC	Type:	Bug
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oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Embargoed:
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Bug Blocks:	1027032

Description Andy Lutomirski 2013-01-14 15:16:41 UTC

libcap-ng does not handle the addition of new capabilities gracefully.  So far, I've found the following issues:

1. CAP_LAST_CAP is exposed in cap-ng.h.  cap-ng.h should instead expose a function or an extern const int that is set at runtime.  This makes looping over all capabilities work poorly.  (/proc/sys/kernel/cap_last_cap is there for exactly this reason.)

2. capng_capability_to_name returns null (often causing segfaults) when the input parameter isn't in the lookup table.  It could return something more clever like "cap_%d" with %d filled in appropriately.  (Leaking a few bytes per unknown capability number wouldn't be so bad -- it's a bounded leak.)

3. capng_name_to_capability can't parse names that aren't in the lookup table.

(2 and 3 would be greatly improved if there was a way to ask the kernel for the names of capabilities.)

4. CAP_LAST_CAP is a compile-time constant in cap-ng.c, meaning that many things are likely to break if new capabilities are added.


A stopgap measure would be to just fix #1 so that a mismatch between header and library version won't cause problems.

Comment 1 Steve Grubb 2013-01-14 15:26:18 UTC

Hmm...I didn't know about that proc entry. I'll see what I can do. I can likely do something with #2, but not #3. Thanks for pointing out the proc entry. The audit system and strace would have the same issues on interpreting unknown capabilities.

Comment 2 Andy Lutomirski 2013-01-14 15:36:05 UTC

Allowing capng_name_to_capability to parse cap_<number> is probably the best that can be done about #3.

Comment 3 Fedora End Of Life 2013-07-04 03:22:17 UTC

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Comment 4 Steve Grubb 2013-07-04 14:01:13 UTC

Still planning to make some changes...moving to rawhide.

Comment 5 Steve Grubb 2013-11-15 19:33:59 UTC

This now fixed in SVN and will be in libcap-ng-0.7.4.

Comment 6 Steve Grubb 2014-05-01 02:37:12 UTC

A new package was released fixing this.