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Re: pcp updates: pmdaproc, user/group ACLs

To: Nathan Scott <nathans@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: pcp updates: pmdaproc, user/group ACLs
From: fche@xxxxxxxxxx (Frank Ch. Eigler)
Date: Wed, 12 Jun 2013 14:06:12 -0400
Cc: PCP <pcp@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Delivered-to: pcp@xxxxxxxxxxx
In-reply-to: <558715630.23966194.1371026929717.JavaMail.root@xxxxxxxxxx> (Nathan Scott's message of "Wed, 12 Jun 2013 04:48:49 -0400 (EDT)")
References: <742570508.23966097.1371026899281.JavaMail.root@xxxxxxxxxx> <558715630.23966194.1371026929717.JavaMail.root@xxxxxxxxxx>
User-agent: Gnus/5.1008 (Gnus v5.10.8) Emacs/21.4 (gnu/linux)
nathans wrote:

> [...]
>     Introduces knowledge of each connection, and its security attrs
>     (particularly uid and gid), in pmdaproc.  This allows a suitably
>     configured pmcd process (with user/group ACLs) and authenticated
>     client connections to be able to retrieve sensitive information
>     for the specific authenticated user and not others.  Without ACL
>     specification in pmcd.conf the behaviour is unchanged from today
>     (i.e. pmdaproc always runs as root and can access everything).

How would this ACL look in practice?  We certainly wouldn't want to
require a sysadmin to enumerate all userids in an ACL, just to have
pmdaproc be willing to setuid-or-equivalent-check for them for proc
file reading.

Perhaps we need only an option for pmdaproc that says
"show-own-processes-only": ie., for authenticated pcp connections, use
the given uid for permission checks; for unauthenticated pcp
connections, show nothing.  This would allow us to enable pmdaproc by
default.  (Having a pmcd.conf level ACL can compose with this to
impose further restrictions.)

- FChE

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