I’ve had problems with systems running SE Linux on BTRFS losing the XATTRs used for storing the SE Linux file labels after a power outage.
Here is the link to the patch that fixes this [1]. Thanks to Hans van Kranenburg and Holger Hoffstätte for the information about this patch which was already included in kernel 4.16.11. That was uploaded to Debian on the 27th of May and got into testing about the time that my message about this issue got to the SE Linux list (which was a couple of days before I sent it to the BTRFS developers).
The kernel from Debian/Stable still has the issue. So using a testing kernel might be a good option to deal with this problem at the moment.
Below is the information on reproducing this problem. It may be useful for people who want to reproduce similar problems. Also all sysadmins should know about “reboot -nffd”, if something really goes wrong with your kernel you may need to do that immediately to prevent corrupted data being written to your disks.
The command “reboot -nffd” (kernel reboot without flushing kernel buffers or writing status) when run on a BTRFS system with SE Linux will often result in /var/log/audit/audit.log being unlabeled. It also results in some systemd-journald files like /var/log/journal/c195779d29154ed8bcb4e8444c4a1728/system.journal being unlabeled but that is rarer. I think that the same
problem afflicts both systemd-journald and auditd but it’s a race condition that on my systems (both production and test) is more likely to affect auditd.
root@stretch:/# xattr -l /var/log/audit/audit.log security.selinux: 0000 73 79 73 74 65 6D 5F 75 3A 6F 62 6A 65 63 74 5F system_u:object_ 0010 72 3A 61 75 64 69 74 64 5F 6C 6F 67 5F 74 3A 73 r:auditd_log_t:s 0020 30 00 0.
SE Linux uses the xattr “security.selinux”, you can see what it’s doing with xattr(1) but generally using “ls -Z” is easiest.
If this issue just affected “reboot -nffd” then a solution might be to just not run that command. However this affects systems after a power outage.
I have reproduced this bug with kernel 4.9.0-6-amd64 (the latest security update for Debian/Stretch which is the latest supported release of Debian). I have also reproduced it in an identical manner with kernel 4.16.0-1-amd64 (the latest from Debian/Unstable). For testing I reproduced this with a 4G filesystem in a VM, but in production it has happened on BTRFS RAID-1 arrays, both SSD and HDD.
#!/bin/bash set -e COUNT=$(ps aux|grep [s]bin/auditd|wc -l) date if [ "$COUNT" = "1" ]; then echo "all good" else echo "failed" exit 1 fi
Firstly the above is the script /usr/local/sbin/testit, I test for auditd running because it aborts if the context on it’s log file is wrong. When SE Linux is in enforcing mode an incorrect/missing label on the audit.log file causes auditd to abort.
root@stretch:~# ls -liZ /var/log/audit/audit.log 37952 -rw-------. 1 root root system_u:object_r:auditd_log_t:s0 4385230 Jun 1 12:23 /var/log/audit/audit.log
Above is before I do the tests.
while ssh stretch /usr/local/sbin/testit ; do ssh stretch "reboot -nffd" > /dev/null 2>&1 & sleep 20 done
Above is the shell code I run to do the tests. Note that the VM in question runs on SSD storage which is why it can consistently boot in less than 20 seconds.
Fri 1 Jun 12:26:13 UTC 2018 all good Fri 1 Jun 12:26:33 UTC 2018 failed
Above is the output from the shell code in question. After the first reboot it fails. The probability of failure on my test system is greater than 50%.
root@stretch:~# ls -liZ /var/log/audit/audit.log 37952 -rw-------. 1 root root system_u:object_r:unlabeled_t:s0 4396803 Jun 1 12:26 /var/log/audit/audit.log
Now the result. Note that the Inode has not changed. I could understand a newly created file missing an xattr, but this is an existing file which shouldn’t have had it’s xattr changed. But somehow it gets corrupted.
The first possibility I considered was that SE Linux code might be at fault. I asked on the SE Linux mailing list (I haven’t been involved in SE Linux kernel code for about 15 years) and was informed that this isn’t likely at
all. There have been no problems like this reported with other filesystems.