Provided by: libguestfs0_1.36.13-1ubuntu3.3_amd64 bug

NAME

       guestfs-security - security of libguestfs

DESCRIPTION

       This manual page discusses security implications of using libguestfs, particularly with
       untrusted or malicious guests or disk images.

REPORTING SECURITY PROBLEMS

       If you wish to privately report a security issue, please follow the Red Hat security
       procedure at https://access.redhat.com/security/team/contact

       If the security problem is not so serious, you can simply file a bug (see "BUGS" below),
       or send an email to our mailing list (https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/libguestfs).
       You do not need to subscribe to the mailing list to send email, but there will be a delay
       while the message is moderated.

GENERAL ISSUES

   Security of mounting filesystems
       You should never mount an untrusted guest filesystem directly on your host kernel (eg.
       using loopback or kpartx).

       When you mount a filesystem, mistakes in the kernel filesystem (VFS) can be escalated into
       exploits by attackers creating a malicious filesystem.  These exploits are very severe for
       two reasons.  Firstly there are very many filesystem drivers in the kernel, and many of
       them are infrequently used and not much developer attention has been paid to the code.
       Linux userspace helps potential crackers by detecting the filesystem type and
       automatically choosing the right VFS driver, even if that filesystem type is unexpected.
       Secondly, a kernel-level exploit is like a local root exploit (worse in some ways), giving
       immediate and total access to the system right down to the hardware level.

       These exploits can be present in the kernel for a very long time
       (https://lwn.net/Articles/538898/).

       Libguestfs provides a layered approach to protecting you from exploits:

          untrusted filesystem
        --------------------------------------
          appliance kernel
        --------------------------------------
          qemu process running as non-root
        --------------------------------------
          sVirt [if using libvirt + SELinux]
        --------------------------------------
          host kernel

       We run a Linux kernel inside a qemu virtual machine, usually running as a non-root user.
       The attacker would need to write a filesystem which first exploited the kernel, and then
       exploited either qemu virtualization (eg. a faulty qemu driver) or the libguestfs
       protocol, and finally to be as serious as the host kernel exploit it would need to
       escalate its privileges to root.  Additionally if you use the libvirt back end and
       SELinux, sVirt is used to confine the qemu process.  This multi-step escalation, performed
       by a static piece of data, is thought to be extremely hard to do, although we never say
       'never' about security issues.

       Callers can also reduce the attack surface by forcing the filesystem type when mounting
       (use "guestfs_mount_vfs" in guestfs(3)).

   General security considerations
       Be careful with any files or data that you download from a guest (by "download" we mean
       not just the "guestfs_download" in guestfs(3) command but any command that reads files,
       filenames, directories or anything else from a disk image).  An attacker could manipulate
       the data to fool your program into doing the wrong thing.  Consider cases such as:

       •   the data (file etc) not being present

       •   being present but empty

       •   being much larger than normal

       •   containing arbitrary 8 bit data

       •   being in an unexpected character encoding

       •   containing homoglyphs.

   Protocol security
       The protocol is designed to be secure, being based on RFC 4506 (XDR) with a defined upper
       message size.  However a program that uses libguestfs must also take care - for example
       you can write a program that downloads a binary from a disk image and executes it locally,
       and no amount of protocol security will save you from the consequences.

   Inspection security
       Parts of the inspection API (see "INSPECTION" in guestfs(3)) return untrusted strings
       directly from the guest, and these could contain any 8 bit data.  Callers should be
       careful to escape these before printing them to a structured file (for example, use HTML
       escaping if creating a web page).

       Guest configuration may be altered in unusual ways by the administrator of the virtual
       machine, and may not reflect reality (particularly for untrusted or actively malicious
       guests).  For example we parse the hostname from configuration files like
       /etc/sysconfig/network that we find in the guest, but the guest administrator can easily
       manipulate these files to provide the wrong hostname.

       The inspection API parses guest configuration using two external libraries: Augeas (Linux
       configuration) and hivex (Windows Registry).  Both are designed to be robust in the face
       of malicious data, although denial of service attacks are still possible, for example with
       oversized configuration files.

   Running untrusted guest commands
       Be very cautious about running commands from the guest.  By running a command in the
       guest, you are giving CPU time to a binary that you do not control, under the same user
       account as the library, albeit wrapped in qemu virtualization.  More information and
       alternatives can be found in "RUNNING COMMANDS" in guestfs(3).

HISTORICAL SECURITY ISSUES IN LIBGUESTFS

   CVE-2010-3851
       https://bugzilla.redhat.com/642934

       This security bug concerns the automatic disk format detection that qemu does on disk
       images.

       A raw disk image is just the raw bytes, there is no header.  Other disk images like qcow2
       contain a special header.  Qemu deals with this by looking for one of the known headers,
       and if none is found then assuming the disk image must be raw.

       This allows a guest which has been given a raw disk image to write some other header.  At
       next boot (or when the disk image is accessed by libguestfs) qemu would do autodetection
       and think the disk image format was, say, qcow2 based on the header written by the guest.

       This in itself would not be a problem, but qcow2 offers many features, one of which is to
       allow a disk image to refer to another image (called the "backing disk").  It does this by
       placing the path to the backing disk into the qcow2 header.  This path is not validated
       and could point to any host file (eg. "/etc/passwd").  The backing disk is then exposed
       through "holes" in the qcow2 disk image, which of course is completely under the control
       of the attacker.

       In libguestfs this is rather hard to exploit except under two circumstances:

       1.  You have enabled the network or have opened the disk in write mode.

       2.  You are also running untrusted code from the guest (see "RUNNING COMMANDS" in
           guestfs(3)).

       The way to avoid this is to specify the expected disk format when adding disks (the
       optional "format" option to "guestfs_add_drive_opts" in guestfs(3)).  You should always do
       this if the disk is raw format, and it's a good idea for other cases too.  (See also "DISK
       IMAGE FORMATS" in guestfs(3)).

       For disks added from libvirt using calls like "guestfs_add_domain" in guestfs(3), the
       format is fetched from libvirt and passed through.

       For libguestfs tools, use the --format command line parameter as appropriate.

   CVE-2011-4127
       https://bugzilla.redhat.com/752375

       This is a bug in the kernel which allowed guests to overwrite parts of the host's drives
       which they should not normally have access to.

       It is sufficient to update libguestfs to any version ≥ 1.16 which contains a change that
       mitigates the problem.

   CVE-2012-2690
       https://bugzilla.redhat.com/831117

       Old versions of both virt-edit and the guestfish "edit" command created a new file
       containing the changes but did not set the permissions, etc of the new file to match the
       old one.  The result of this was that if you edited a security sensitive file such as
       /etc/shadow then it would be left world-readable after the edit.

       It is sufficient to update libguestfs to any version ≥ 1.16.

   CVE-2013-2124
       https://bugzilla.redhat.com/968306

       This security bug was a flaw in inspection where an untrusted guest using a specially
       crafted file in the guest OS could cause a double-free in the C library (denial of
       service).

       It is sufficient to update libguestfs to a version that is not vulnerable: libguestfs ≥
       1.20.8, ≥ 1.22.2 or ≥ 1.23.2.

   CVE-2013-4419
       https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1016960

       When using the guestfish(1) --remote or guestfish --listen options, guestfish would create
       a socket in a known location (/tmp/.guestfish-$UID/socket-$PID).

       The location has to be a known one in order for both ends to communicate.  However no
       checking was done that the containing directory (/tmp/.guestfish-$UID) is owned by the
       user.  Thus another user could create this directory and potentially hijack sockets owned
       by another user's guestfish client or server.

       It is sufficient to update libguestfs to a version that is not vulnerable: libguestfs ≥
       1.20.12, ≥ 1.22.7 or ≥ 1.24.

   Denial of service when inspecting disk images with corrupt btrfs volumes
       It was possible to crash libguestfs (and programs that use libguestfs as a library) by
       presenting a disk image containing a corrupt btrfs volume.

       This was caused by a NULL pointer dereference causing a denial of service, and is not
       thought to be exploitable any further.

       See commit d70ceb4cbea165c960710576efac5a5716055486 for the fix.  This fix is included in
       libguestfs stable branches ≥ 1.26.0, ≥ 1.24.6 and ≥ 1.22.8, and also in RHEL ≥ 7.0.
       Earlier versions of libguestfs are not vulnerable.

   CVE-2014-0191
       Libguestfs previously used unsafe libxml2 APIs for parsing libvirt XML.  These APIs
       defaulted to allowing network connections to be made when certain XML documents were
       presented.  Using a malformed XML document it was also possible to exhaust all CPU, memory
       or file descriptors on the machine.

       Since the libvirt XML comes from a trusted source (the libvirt daemon) it is not thought
       that this could have been exploitable.

       This was fixed in libguestfs ≥ 1.27.9 and the fix was backported to stable versions ≥
       1.26.2, ≥ 1.24.9, ≥ 1.22.10 and ≥ 1.20.13.

   Shellshock (bash CVE-2014-6271)
       This bash bug indirectly affects libguestfs.  For more information see:
       https://www.redhat.com/archives/libguestfs/2014-September/msg00252.html

   CVE-2014-8484
   CVE-2014-8485
       These two bugs in binutils affect the GNU strings(1) program, and thus the
       "guestfs_strings" in guestfs(3) and "guestfs_strings_e" in guestfs(3) APIs in libguestfs.
       Running strings on an untrusted file could cause arbitrary code execution (confined to the
       libguestfs appliance).

       In libguestfs ≥ 1.29.5 and ≥ 1.28.3, libguestfs uses the "strings" -a option to avoid BFD
       parsing on the file.

   CVE-2015-5745
       https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1251157

       This is not a vulnerability in libguestfs, but because we always give a virtio-serial port
       to each guest (since that is how guest-host communication happens), an escalation from the
       appliance to the host qemu process is possible.  This could affect you if:

       •   your libguestfs program runs untrusted programs out of the guest (using "guestfs_sh"
           in guestfs(3) etc), or

       •   another exploit was found in (for example) kernel filesystem code that allowed a
           malformed filesystem to take over the appliance.

       If you use sVirt to confine qemu, that would thwart some attacks.

   Permissions of .ssh and .ssh/authorized_keys
       https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1260778

       The tools virt-customize(1), virt-sysprep(1) and virt-builder(1) have an --ssh-inject
       option for injecting an SSH key into virtual machine disk images.  They may create a
       ~user/.ssh directory and ~user/.ssh/authorized_keys file in the guest to do this.

       In libguestfs < 1.31.5 and libguestfs < 1.30.2, the new directory and file would get mode
       0755 and mode 0644 respectively.  However these permissions (especially for ~user/.ssh)
       are wider than the permissions that OpenSSH uses.  In current libguestfs, the directory
       and file are created with mode 0700 and mode 0600.

   CVE-2015-8869
       https://bugzilla.redhat.com/CVE-2015-8869

       This vulnerability in OCaml might affect virt tools written in the OCaml programming
       language.  It affects only 64 bit platforms.  Because this bug affects code generation it
       is difficult to predict which precise software could be affected, and therefore our
       recommendation is that you recompile libguestfs using a version of the OCaml compiler
       where this bug has been fixed (or ask your Linux distro to do the same).

   CVE-2017-5208, CVE-2017-5331, CVE-2017-5332, CVE-2017-5333, CVE-2017-6009, CVE-2017-6010,
       CVE-2017-6011
       Multiple vulnerabilities in the wrestool(1) program in the "icoutils" package can be
       exploited for local code execution on the host.

       When libguestfs inspection (see "Inspection security" above) detects a Windows XP or
       Windows 7 guest and is asked to find an associated icon for the guest, it will download an
       untrusted file from the guest and run "wrestool -x" on that file.  This can lead to local
       code execution on the host.  Any disk image or guest can be crafted to look like a Windows
       guest to libguestfs inspection, so just because you do not have Windows guests does not
       help.

       Any program calling the libguestfs API "guestfs_inspect_get_icon" could be vulnerable.
       This includes virt-inspector(1) and virt-manager(1).

       The solution is to update to the non-vulnerable version of icoutils (at least 0.31.1).

   CVE-2017-7244, CVE-2017-7245, CVE-2017-7246
       Multiple vulnerabilities in PCRE could be exploited to crash libguestfs (ie. cause a
       denial of service) when performing inspection on an untrusted virtual machine.

       The solution is to update to a version of PCRE with these bugs fixed (upstream version ≥
       8.41).

SEE ALSO

       guestfs(3), guestfs-internals(1), guestfs-release-notes(1), guestfs-testing(1),
       http://libguestfs.org/.

AUTHORS

       Richard W.M. Jones ("rjones at redhat dot com")

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright (C) 2009-2017 Red Hat Inc.

LICENSE

       This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of
       the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either
       version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

       This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY;
       without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
       See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

       You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with this
       library; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth
       Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA

BUGS

       To get a list of bugs against libguestfs, use this link:
       https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?component=libguestfs&product=Virtualization+Tools

       To report a new bug against libguestfs, use this link:
       https://bugzilla.redhat.com/enter_bug.cgi?component=libguestfs&product=Virtualization+Tools

       When reporting a bug, please supply:

       •   The version of libguestfs.

       •   Where you got libguestfs (eg. which Linux distro, compiled from source, etc)

       •   Describe the bug accurately and give a way to reproduce it.

       •   Run libguestfs-test-tool(1) and paste the complete, unedited output into the bug
           report.