filepath-securejoin

Old API

This library was originally just an implementation of SecureJoin which was intended to be included in the Go standard library as a safer filepath.Join that would restrict the path lookup to be inside a root directory.

The implementation was based on code that existed in several container runtimes. Unfortunately, this API is fundamentally unsafe against attackers that can modify path components after SecureJoin returns and before the caller uses the path, allowing for some fairly trivial TOCTOU attacks.

SecureJoin (and SecureJoinVFS) are still provided by this library to support legacy users, but new users are strongly suggested to avoid using SecureJoin and instead use the new api or switch to libpathrs.

With the above limitations in mind, this library guarantees the following:

• If no error is set, the resulting string must be a child path of root and will not contain any symlink path components (they will all be expanded).

• When expanding symlinks, all symlink path components must be resolved relative to the provided root. In particular, this can be considered a userspace implementation of how chroot(2) operates on file paths. Note that these symlinks will not be expanded lexically (filepath.Clean is not called on the input before processing).

• Non-existent path components are unaffected by SecureJoin (similar to filepath.EvalSymlinks's semantics).

• The returned path will always be filepath.Cleaned and thus not contain any .. components.

A (trivial) implementation of this function on GNU/Linux systems could be done with the following (note that this requires root privileges and is far more opaque than the implementation in this library, and also requires that readlink is inside the root path and is trustworthy):

package securejoin

import (
	"os/exec"
	"path/filepath"
)

func SecureJoin(root, unsafePath string) (string, error) {
	unsafePath = string(filepath.Separator) + unsafePath
	cmd := exec.Command("chroot", root,
		"readlink", "--canonicalize-missing", "--no-newline", unsafePath)
	output, err := cmd.CombinedOutput()
	if err != nil {
		return "", err
	}
	expanded := string(output)
	return filepath.Join(root, expanded), nil
}

New API

While we recommend users switch to libpathrs as soon as it has a stable release, some methods implemented by libpathrs have been ported to this library to ease the transition. These APIs are only supported on Linux.

These APIs are implemented such that filepath-securejoin will opportunistically use certain newer kernel APIs that make these operations far more secure. In particular:

• All of the lookup operations will use openat2 on new enough kernels (Linux 5.6 or later) to restrict lookups through magic-links and bind-mounts (for certain operations) and to make use of RESOLVE_IN_ROOT to efficiently resolve symlinks within a rootfs.

• The APIs provide hardening against a malicious /proc mount to either detect or avoid being tricked by a /proc that is not legitimate. This is done using openat2 for all users, and privileged users will also be further protected by using fsopen and open_tree (Linux 5.2 or later).

OpenInRoot

func OpenInRoot(root, unsafePath string) (*os.File, error)
func OpenatInRoot(root *os.File, unsafePath string) (*os.File, error)
func Reopen(handle *os.File, flags int) (*os.File, error)

OpenInRoot is a much safer version of

path, err := securejoin.SecureJoin(root, unsafePath)
file, err := os.OpenFile(path, unix.O_PATH|unix.O_CLOEXEC)

that protects against various race attacks that could lead to serious security issues, depending on the application. Note that the returned *os.File is an O_PATH file descriptor, which is quite restricted. Callers will probably need to use Reopen to get a more usable handle (this split is done to provide useful features like PTY spawning and to avoid users accidentally opening bad inodes that could cause a DoS).

Callers need to be careful in how they use the returned *os.File. Usually it is only safe to operate on the handle directly, and it is very easy to create a security issue. libpathrs provides far more helpers to make using these handles safer -- there is currently no plan to port them to filepath-securejoin.

OpenatInRoot is like OpenInRoot except that the root is provided using an *os.File. This allows you to ensure that multiple OpenatInRoot (or MkdirAllHandle) calls are operating on the same rootfs.

NOTE: Unlike SecureJoin, OpenInRoot will error out as soon as it hits a dangling symlink or non-existent path. This is in contrast to SecureJoin which treated non-existent components as though they were real directories, and would allow for partial resolution of dangling symlinks. These behaviours are at odds with how Linux treats non-existent paths and dangling symlinks, and so these are no longer allowed.

MkdirAll

func MkdirAll(root, unsafePath string, mode int) error
func MkdirAllHandle(root *os.File, unsafePath string, mode int) (*os.File, error)

MkdirAll is a much safer version of

path, err := securejoin.SecureJoin(root, unsafePath)
err = os.MkdirAll(path, mode)

that protects against the same kinds of races that OpenInRoot protects against.

MkdirAllHandle is like MkdirAll except that the root is provided using an *os.File (the reason for this is the same as with OpenatInRoot) and an *os.File of the final created directory is returned (this directory is guaranteed to be effectively identical to the directory created by MkdirAllHandle, which is not possible to ensure by just using OpenatInRoot after MkdirAll).

NOTE: Unlike SecureJoin, MkdirAll will error out as soon as it hits a dangling symlink or non-existent path. This is in contrast to SecureJoin which treated non-existent components as though they were real directories, and would allow for partial resolution of dangling symlinks. These behaviours are at odds with how Linux treats non-existent paths and dangling symlinks, and so these are no longer allowed. This means that MkdirAll will not create non-existent directories referenced by a dangling symlink.

License

The license of this project is the same as Go, which is a BSD 3-clause license available in the LICENSE file.