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Bug 1840578 - Scanning a system with GPFS filesystems can take the system down
Summary: Scanning a system with GPFS filesystems can take the system down
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED ERRATA
Alias: None
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8
Classification: Red Hat
Component: openscap
Version: 8.2
Hardware: Unspecified
OS: Unspecified
high
high
Target Milestone: rc
: 8.0
Assignee: Jan Černý
QA Contact: Matus Marhefka
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2020-05-27 09:08 UTC by Renaud Métrich
Modified: 2023-10-06 20:16 UTC (History)
3 users (show)

Fixed In Version: openscap-1.3.4-1.el8
Doc Type: No Doc Update
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2021-05-18 15:29:12 UTC
Type: Bug
Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:
pm-rhel: mirror+

Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description Renaud Métrich 2020-05-27 09:08:19 UTC 
This bug was initially created as a copy of Bug #1840575

I am copying this bug because: 

Also applies to RHEL 8


Description of problem:

This is a follow-up of BZ #1694962.

A customer executing oscap on all of his systems sees oscap consume all of the system memory while rule "file_permissions_unauthorized_world_writable" browses the GPFS file system which seems to be very deep in customer's case.
The rule executes because GPFS file systems are not considered as remote file systems.

Having such behaviour is just not acceptable.

A workaround to avoid browsing GPFS filesystems is described in KCS https://access.redhat.com/solutions/4193501 but the workaround doesn't apply to the customer because in his case the oscap execution is done through foreman which runs as a cron which was installed by Satellite.
Due to having a cron, it's not possible to limit the memory being used by oscap nor to exclude certain paths, at least on RHEL 7.

I'm hence requesting a hardening of the oscap tool to protect the system from possible bad behaviour **by default**.

A solution may be to have "oscap" re-execute itself in a scope with limited memory ("systemd-run --scope -p MemoryLimit=1G -- oscap ...").


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

openscap-scanner-1.2.17-9.el7.x86_64 and later


How reproducible:

Always on customer site
Comment 1 Jan Černý 2020-09-09 07:54:34 UTC 
On the scanner side we will prevent scanning GPFS system by considering GPFS as a remote filesystem. This was added to upstream in https://github.com/OpenSCAP/openscap/commit/1541487788a7ffeae0f9ba3ecd4bf7c2a181ef5d. This change means that when evaluating rules that set OVAL attribute "recurse_file_system" to "local" the GPFS mounts won't be read. It assumes that the used SCAP content that provides the rules uses this attribute. In scap-security-guide it is the case for most of the rules.

As a side note, in scap-security-guide we're working on providing an option to exclude directories specified by user so that the user can tailor the rules and therefore force the scanner ot not scan paths they don't want. See https://github.com/ComplianceAsCode/content/pull/5845.

Regarding the cgroups/systemd limit, I think that this can be solved on Foreman side, I suggest opening a feature request for Foreman to be able to spawn processes with memory limits.

We also think that the problem with excessive memory usage was mostly caused by memory leak in rpmverifyfile probe: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1861301
Comment 14 errata-xmlrpc 2021-05-18 15:29:12 UTC 
Since the problem described in this bug report should be
resolved in a recent advisory, it has been closed with a
resolution of ERRATA.

For information on the advisory (openscap bug fix and enhancement update), and where to find the updated
files, follow the link below.

If the solution does not work for you, open a new bug report.

https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHEA-2021:1784
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