Having fun with seccomp profiles on the edge

By Sascha Grunert |

The Security Profiles Operator (SPO) is a feature-rich operator for Kubernetes to make managing seccomp, SELinux and AppArmor profiles easier than ever. Recording those profiles from scratch is one of the key features of this operator, which usually involves the integration into large CI/CD systems. Being able to test the recording capabilities of the operator in edge cases is one of the recent development efforts of the SPO and makes it excitingly easy to play around with seccomp profiles.

Recording seccomp profiles with spoc record

The v0.8.0 release of the Security Profiles Operator shipped a new command line interface called spoc, a little helper tool for recording and replaying seccomp profiles among various other things that are out of scope of this blog post.

Recording a seccomp profile requires a binary to be executed, which can be a simple golang application which just calls uname(2):

package main

import (
	"syscall"
)

func main() {
	utsname := syscall.Utsname{}
	if err := syscall.Uname(&utsname); err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
}

Building a binary from that code can be done by:

> go build -o main main.go
> ldd ./main
        not a dynamic executable

Now it's possible to download the latest binary of spoc from GitHub and run the application on Linux with it:

> sudo ./spoc record ./main
10:08:25.591945 Loading bpf module
10:08:25.591958 Using system btf file
libbpf: loading object 'recorder.bpf.o' from buffer
…
libbpf: prog 'sys_enter': relo #3: patched insn #22 (ALU/ALU64) imm 16 -> 16
10:08:25.610767 Getting bpf program sys_enter
10:08:25.610778 Attaching bpf tracepoint
10:08:25.611574 Getting syscalls map
10:08:25.611582 Getting pid_mntns map
10:08:25.613097 Module successfully loaded
10:08:25.613311 Processing events
10:08:25.613693 Running command with PID: 336007
10:08:25.613835 Received event: pid: 336007, mntns: 4026531841
10:08:25.613951 No container ID found for PID (pid=336007, mntns=4026531841, err=unable to find container ID in cgroup path)
10:08:25.614856 Processing recorded data
10:08:25.614975 Found process mntns 4026531841 in bpf map
10:08:25.615110 Got syscalls: read, close, mmap, rt_sigaction, rt_sigprocmask, madvise, nanosleep, clone, uname, sigaltstack, arch_prctl, gettid, futex, sched_getaffinity, exit_group, openat
10:08:25.615195 Adding base syscalls: access, brk, capget, capset, chdir, chmod, chown, close_range, dup2, dup3, epoll_create1, epoll_ctl, epoll_pwait, execve, faccessat2, fchdir, fchmodat, fchown, fchownat, fcntl, fstat, fstatfs, getdents64, getegid, geteuid, getgid, getpid, getppid, getuid, ioctl, keyctl, lseek, mkdirat, mknodat, mount, mprotect, munmap, newfstatat, openat2, pipe2, pivot_root, prctl, pread64, pselect6, readlink, readlinkat, rt_sigreturn, sched_yield, seccomp, set_robust_list, set_tid_address, setgid, setgroups, sethostname, setns, setresgid, setresuid, setsid, setuid, statfs, statx, symlinkat, tgkill, umask, umount2, unlinkat, unshare, write
10:08:25.616293 Wrote seccomp profile to: /tmp/profile.yaml
10:08:25.616298 Unloading bpf module

I have to execute spoc as root because it will internally run an ebpf program by reusing the same code parts from the Security Profiles Operator itself. I can see that the bpf module got loaded successfully and spoc attached the required tracepoint to it. Then it will track the main application by using its mount namespace and process the recorded syscall data. The nature of ebpf programs is that they see the whole context of the Kernel, which means that spoc tracks all syscalls of the system, but does not interfere with their execution.

The logs indicate that spoc found the syscalls read, close, mmap and so on, including uname. All other syscalls than uname are coming from the golang runtime and its garbage collection, which already adds overhead to a basic application like in our demo. I can also see from the log line Adding base syscalls: … that spoc adds a bunch of base syscalls to the resulting profile. Those are used by the OCI runtime (like runc or crun) in order to be able to run a container. This means that spoc can be used to record seccomp profiles which then can be containerized directly. This behavior can be disabled in spoc by using the --no-base-syscalls/-n or customized via the --base-syscalls/-b command line flags. This can be helpful in cases where different OCI runtimes other than crun and runc are used, or if I just want to record the seccomp profile for the application and stack it with another base profile.

The resulting profile is now available in /tmp/profile.yaml, but the default location can be changed using the --output-file value/-o flag:

> cat /tmp/profile.yaml

apiVersion: security-profiles-operator.x-k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: SeccompProfile
metadata:
  creationTimestamp: null
  name: main
spec:
  architectures:
    - SCMP_ARCH_X86_64
  defaultAction: SCMP_ACT_ERRNO
  syscalls:
    - action: SCMP_ACT_ALLOW
      names:
        - access
        - arch_prctl
        - brk
        - …
        - uname
        - …
status: {}

The seccomp profile Custom Resource Definition (CRD) can be directly used together with the Security Profiles Operator for managing it within Kubernetes. spoc is also capable of producing raw seccomp profiles (as JSON), by using the --type/-t raw-seccomp flag:

> sudo ./spoc record --type raw-seccomp ./main
…
52.628827 Wrote seccomp profile to: /tmp/profile.json

> jq . /tmp/profile.json

{
  "defaultAction": "SCMP_ACT_ERRNO",
  "architectures": ["SCMP_ARCH_X86_64"],
  "syscalls": [
    {
      "names": ["access", "…", "write"],
      "action": "SCMP_ACT_ALLOW"
    }
  ]
}

The utility spoc record allows us to record complex seccomp profiles directly from binary invocations in any Linux system which is capable of running the ebpf code within the Kernel. But it can do more: How about modifying the seccomp profile and then testing it by using spoc run.

Running seccomp profiles with spoc run

spoc is also able to run binaries with applied seccomp profiles, making it easy to test any modification to it. To do that, just run:

> sudo ./spoc run ./main
10:29:58.153263 Reading file /tmp/profile.yaml
10:29:58.153311 Assuming YAML profile
10:29:58.154138 Setting up seccomp
10:29:58.154178 Load seccomp profile
10:29:58.154189 Starting audit log enricher
10:29:58.154224 Enricher reading from file /var/log/audit/audit.log
10:29:58.155356 Running command with PID: 437880
>

It looks like that the application exited successfully, which is anticipated because I did not modify the previously recorded profile yet. I can also specify a custom location for the profile by using the --profile/-p flag, but this was not necessary because I did not modify the default output location from the record. spoc will automatically determine if it's a raw (JSON) or CRD (YAML) based seccomp profile and then apply it to the process.

The Security Profiles Operator supports a log enricher feature, which provides additional seccomp related information by parsing the audit logs. spoc run uses the enricher in the same way to provide more data to the end users when it comes to debugging seccomp profiles.

Now I have to modify the profile to see anything valuable in the output. For example, I could remove the allowed uname syscall:

> jq 'del(.syscalls[0].names[] | select(. == "uname"))' /tmp/profile.json > /tmp/no-uname-profile.json

And then try to run it again with the new profile /tmp/no-uname-profile.json:

> sudo ./spoc run -p /tmp/no-uname-profile.json ./main
10:39:12.707798 Reading file /tmp/no-uname-profile.json
10:39:12.707892 Setting up seccomp
10:39:12.707920 Load seccomp profile
10:39:12.707982 Starting audit log enricher
10:39:12.707998 Enricher reading from file /var/log/audit/audit.log
10:39:12.709164 Running command with PID: 480512
panic: operation not permitted

goroutine 1 [running]:
main.main()
        /path/to/main.go:10 +0x85
10:39:12.713035 Unable to run: launch runner: wait for command: exit status 2

Alright, that was expected! The applied seccomp profile blocks the uname syscall, which results in an "operation not permitted" error. This error is pretty generic and does not provide any hint on what got blocked by seccomp. It is generally extremely difficult to predict how applications behave if single syscalls are forbidden by seccomp. It could be possible that the application terminates like in our simple demo, but it could also lead to a strange misbehavior and the application does not stop at all.

If I now change the default seccomp action of the profile from SCMP_ACT_ERRNO to SCMP_ACT_LOG like this:

> jq '.defaultAction = "SCMP_ACT_LOG"' /tmp/no-uname-profile.json > /tmp/no-uname-profile-log.json

Then the log enricher will give us a hint that the uname syscall got blocked when using spoc run:

> sudo ./spoc run -p /tmp/no-uname-profile-log.json ./main
10:48:07.470126 Reading file /tmp/no-uname-profile-log.json
10:48:07.470234 Setting up seccomp
10:48:07.470245 Load seccomp profile
10:48:07.470302 Starting audit log enricher
10:48:07.470339 Enricher reading from file /var/log/audit/audit.log
10:48:07.470889 Running command with PID: 522268
10:48:07.472007 Seccomp: uname (63)

The application will not terminate any more, but seccomp will log the behavior to /var/log/audit/audit.log and spoc will parse the data to correlate it directly to our program. Generating the log messages to the audit subsystem comes with a large performance overhead and should be handled with care in production systems. It also comes with a security risk when running untrusted apps in audit mode in production environments.

This demo should give you an impression how to debug seccomp profile issues with applications, probably by using our shiny new helper tool powered by the features of the Security Profiles Operator. spoc is a flexible and portable binary suitable for edge cases where resources are limited and even Kubernetes itself may not be available with its full capabilities.

Thank you for reading this blog post! If you're interested in more, providing feedback or asking for help, then feel free to get in touch with us directly via Slack (#security-profiles-operator) or the mailing list.