strdupa(input) without any length check

Fix is to replace it with unbounded malloc() instead of checking for sane length first.

And yes, I know that really that is only a limit of the system call path lenght, and in theory you can work with longer paths (by changing the current directory to a path and then opening a file from there), because filesystems does (stupidly in my opinion) support it.

But in reality, how many applications will break? Does it make sense to support them?

Also the code in question seems to be dealing with a filename more than a path. A file name shouldn't be longer than NAME_MAX, and that is an hard limit of many (possibly all?) filesystems, as far as I know. So why?

It would be simpler and more optimized to just truncate the name at PATH_MAX. Avoid the overflow and the crash but give an error. Why hard limits are considered that bad? We waste time supporting edge cases that no one would really use in a real system (no way someone needs a path longer than 4096 bytes...), for what? In Windows the limit is 260 characters, and nobody seems to be bothered by that, only in Windows 10 you can increase that.

  $ strace -e trace=file perl -e 'open(FH, "<", "/" x 4096)'
  …
  openat(AT_FDCWD, "//////////…"..., O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENAMETOOLONG (File name too long)
  +++ exited with 0 +++

EDIT: And on Solaris PATH_MAX is 1024 and (AFAICT) Solaris also copies paths into kernel space. It seems I was confusing things with NL_TEXTMAX, which is INT_MAX on glibc (but not Solaris).

The Linux kernel defines upper limits for NAME_MAX (255) and PATH_MAX (4096).

The glibc doesn't enforce this limit because it was originally written to run on GNU HURD which I guess doesn't have these limits.

But systemd only runs on glibc on Linux. So I don't see why it doesn't at least sanity check the length of absolute paths with PATH_MAX...

Does the code in question ever run in a tight loop (e.g. on file operations after the filesystem is mounted), or just at mount time?

If it's just at mount time, "reducing performance" by one malloc vs a stack adjustment doesn't seem to me like it should be a primary concern.

If PID 1 does need to do that kind of stuff (as it seems), I would prefer it to fork a process and do the memory allocation in that, so if that process crashes because you are out of memory the kernel doesn't panic.

That almost sounds like the 260 character windows path limit constant used by some ancient APIs. I would assume that any API limited to that path length is dated and probably unreliable in various contexts as the wikipedia article on filesystems explicitly gives the limit as not defined for various Linux filesystems. Also given the recent talk about in kernel support for NTFS (path limit ~2^16) I assume that any historic code still relying on PATH_MAX needs to be fixed.

PATH_MAX is a limit of a path that you can pass to the various path manipulating functions, open(), unlink(), etc, or returned by getcwd() (that gives an error if path is longer than PATH_MAX, and yes there are non standard system call to go around this limit but... why?)

You can however use paths longer by PATH_MAX, how? Simply chdir() PATH_MAX, then you can chdir() another PATH_MAX, then count how many software breaks...

Imposing a limit on paths makes sense and should be done. 4096 bytes seems reasonable to me. Also, in that example, it wasn't even a matter of a path! They are parsing it seems only the file name, and that is defined to be NAME_MAX, that is 255 bytes, on every system and every filesystem!

I also do never understand why some libraries use "faster" methods everywhere, unless safer ones. it's not like all interfaces to systemd would need to be fast. but they should be secure.

https://capsule8.com/blog/exploiting-systemd-journald-part-1...

Consider that in Linux a path is defined to be a maximum length of PATH_MAX, that is defined to 4096 bytes, and a filename (and directory name) shouldn't be longer than FILE_MAX that is 255 bytes. This limits are defined in the headers and I use them always in writing my C programs (if it crashes... you are doing something really wrong!).

So how the hell do you have a directory that is more than 8Mb? You shouldn't! The filesystem doesn't support it. It's a matter of the filesystem driver that should reject a path that long in my opinion.

Systemd should be fast. It's at the base of the operating system. Also it should consume little memory. You can say, who cares about allocating dynamically a string, or allocating a static buffer of 16Mb, yes we should care, I use Linux computer with 16Mb of RAM, total. Of course they don't run systemd nowadays since it's too big, but in my opinion systemd is good, and I would like to see it more in the embedded world.

Remember that Linux supports hierarchical mounts! You can mount anything at any depth of directory nesting. Even if it were true that MAX_PATH were an FS limitation, you could still nest mounts and encounter absolute paths exceeding MAX_PATH. MAX_PATH is simply the length in bytes of the longest string you should expect system calls to accept as a path parameter.

> I use Linux computer with 16Mb of RAM, total. Of course they don't run systemd nowadays since it's too big, but in my opinion systemd is good, and I would like to see it more in the embedded world.

It sounds like using systemd is a terrible idea for memory-constrained devices, so you really don’t want to see it in the embedded world.

On the other hand, proper event-driven init system (instead of horrible shell scripts with all sorts of fragile "sleep"s and other hacks) sounds sexy for an embedded system. I sometimes get annoyed how home routers, NAS, etc. are slow to boot up

Though the embedded systems I refer to have much more than 16 MB of RAM, more like 128 and up.

ext4 doesn't limit directory depth; only filename length. A filename can be 255 bytes in ext4. How deep that lies in the filesystem isn't limited.

btrfs has the same filename limit, no underlying limit on directory depth.

And I would most likely guess most filesystems don't because the obvious ways to implement directories don't place limits on that depth.

I don't think you could even call strdupa through libc in rust. I would guess that strdupa is either a macro that uses the alloca compiler intrinsic or is itself a compiler intrinsic. Even if it isn't, it will break assumptions the rust compiler makes about the size of the stack frame.

This is likely because Unix semantics treat the init process specially: any process whose parent dies is re-parented to the init process. It's not clear what should happen to these processes if the init process itself went away, so the kernel just gives up.

[1] https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/latest/source/kernel/exit.c...

In a server I generally want a crash immediately. But on a desktop I'd rather it limp along and give me a chance to finish writing my Hackernews post.

I'd much rather _not_ have my desktop "limp along" in a poorly understood and probably exploitable fashion while the malware gets a chance to finish encrypting all my files...

If that costs the world the "benefit" of my shared wisdom in a half written Hackernews post, I'm good with that.

I call these the "already lost" situations. You've already lost, we're just arguing about how to distribute the lossage. While those discussions aren't completely pointless, it is important to keep it clear in our head we're arguing about how to pick up the bodies at a crash site and not how to prevent the crash in the first place; it's a different mindset.

Despite some moderately-justified mockery in the other messages in this thread, the answer really is "just don't crash and have secure code here", which is to say, "don't lose". It's exceeding hard to write and it's a very high bar, but at the same time, it's very difficult to imagine how to secure a single system when you can't even stipulate a core of trusted software exists. If you don't even have a foundation, you're not going to build a secure structure. In this case, by "secure" I don't just mean security, but also, functionality and everything else.

It depends really what your server does, and what the consequences of it doing the wrong thing are.

Fire an alert, remove that server from the load balancer, and fix the problem without your customers even noticing.

Or make sure if you're running a hobby-project architected platform that your customer expectations and SLAs are clear up front, and let it go down until Monday morning when you'll get around to fixing it.

Keeping it small and simple to minimize bugs is perfectly viable and reasonable.

Systemd of course goes in the opposite direction: It assimilates as much functionality as possible from the OS into systemd (though to be fair, not all into PID1).

"Ummm, lets not do that, it's not such a great idea..." -- Windows Vista team, 2006

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions//cc750820...

(Well, it came out late '96, so I suppose a bunch of that was actually done in '95.)

A proper init system similar to runit or s6 would be written in something safer (minimum unsafe) like Rust, be modular, simpler, follow UNIX philosophy, and not try to do everything in one process. Microkernel-style.

My "systemK" joke was indeed implying what you said, that systemd is "a key place in the stack where you would need to be super careful." (Almost Kernel-like.)

And my question was legitimate, although poorly-researched. Answering myself: CVE-2021-33910 only affects systemd, not all FUSE in general.