CAI Qian <caiqian@redhat.com> pointed out that the semantics
of shared subtrees make it possible to create an exponentially
increasing number of mounts in a mount namespace.
mkdir /tmp/1 /tmp/2
mount --make-rshared /
for i in $(seq 1 20) ; do mount --bind /tmp/1 /tmp/2 ; done
Will create create 2^20 or 1048576 mounts, which is a practical problem
as some people have managed to hit this by accident.
As such CVE-2016-6213 was assigned.
Ian Kent <raven@themaw.net> described the situation for autofs users
as follows:
> The number of mounts for direct mount maps is usually not very large because of
> the way they are implemented, large direct mount maps can have performance
> problems. There can be anywhere from a few (likely case a few hundred) to less
> than 10000, plus mounts that have been triggered and not yet expired.
>
> Indirect mounts have one autofs mount at the root plus the number of mounts that
> have been triggered and not yet expired.
>
> The number of autofs indirect map entries can range from a few to the common
> case of several thousand and in rare cases up to between 30000 and 50000. I've
> not heard of people with maps larger than 50000 entries.
>
> The larger the number of map entries the greater the possibility for a large
> number of active mounts so it's not hard to expect cases of a 1000 or somewhat
> more active mounts.
So I am setting the default number of mounts allowed per mount
namespace at 100,000. This is more than enough for any use case I
know of, but small enough to quickly stop an exponential increase
in mounts. Which should be perfect to catch misconfigurations and
malfunctioning programs.
For anyone who needs a higher limit this can be changed by writing
to the new /proc/sys/fs/mount-max sysctl.
Tested-by: CAI Qian <caiqian@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>