Re: [Xen-devel] protection against a domu assigning a uuid to block device

[Sean Greenslade <zootboysean@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 7:20 AM, Ian Jackson <Ian.Jackson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> James Harper writes ("[Xen-devel] protection against a domu assigning a uuid 
> to block device"):
>> I noticed on a Debian Dom0 I built recently that it mounted some volumes by 
>> uuid. That devices in question were aka /dev/sdaX, so mounting by uuid seems 
>> like the sensible thing to do, but what would happen if that uuid became 
>> known to a malicious domu and it wrote the same uuid to its own lvm volume?
>
> Bad things might indeed happen.
>
>> How does Linux cope with multiple uuid's? would it be possible that a volume 
>> mounted by uuid have the malicious domu's lvm volume mounted instead, 
>> assuming these volumes are all available at boot time?
>
> If your system might be exposed to storage media written by hostile
> entities, all the volume uuids etc. need to be treated as secret.
>
> Naturally this problem affects systems which are ever presented witrh
> removeable media from untrusted sources, but it also affects systems
> whose storage management arrangements contain volumes held on behalf
> of untrustworthy clients.
>
> An alternative is to use some kind of encapsulation which the volume
> scanning systems don't know how to look inside, but that essentially
> means that you have to store your vm disk images as files rather than
> block devices.
>
>> Ditto for labels too I guess, and even more so as these are more
>> easily guessable (I've used root, var, and usr as labels before)
>
> Under these circumstances you have to not use labels.
>
> There's a sort of get-out for removeable media which is that in
> general mounting volumes happens at boot time and people already know
> that booting in the presence of untrustworthy removeable media is
> unwise.
>
> Ian.

Theoretically, if you had your boot disks on normal media and all domU
disks on LVM, you could remove LVM scanning from the boot sequence.
Thoughts?

-- 
--Zootboy

Sent from some sort of computing device.

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