Avoiding CVE-2016-8655 with systemd

Just a quick note: on recent versions of systemd it is relatively easy to block the vulnerability described in CVE-2016-8655 for individual services.

Since systemd release v211 there's an option RestrictAddressFamilies= for service unit files which takes away the right to create sockets of specific address families for processes of the service. In your unit file, add RestrictAddressFamilies=~AF_PACKET to the [Service] section to make AF_PACKET unavailable to it (i.e. a blacklist), which is sufficient to close the attack path. Safer of course is a whitelist of address families whch you can define by dropping the ~ character from the assignment. Here's a trivial example:

…
[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/mydaemon
RestrictAddressFamilies=AF_INET AF_INET6 AF_UNIX
…

This restricts access to socket families, so that the service may access only AF_INET, AF_INET6 or AF_UNIX sockets, which is usually the right, minimal set for most system daemons. (AF_INET is the low-level name for the IPv4 address family, AF_INET6 for the IPv6 address family, and AF_UNIX for local UNIX socket IPC).

Starting with systemd v232 we added RestrictAddressFamilies= to all of systemd's own unit files, always with the minimal set of socket address families appropriate.

With the upcoming v233 release we'll provide a second method for blocking this vulnerability. Using RestrictNamespaces= it is possible to limit which types of Linux namespaces a service may get access to. Use RestrictNamespaces=yes to prohibit access to any kind of namespace, or set RestrictNamespaces=net ipc (or similar) to restrict access to a specific set (in this case: network and IPC namespaces). Given that user namespaces have been a major source of security vulnerabilities in the past months it's probably a good idea to block namespaces on all services which don't need them (which is probably most of them).

Of course, ideally, distributions such as Fedora, as well as upstream developers would turn on the various sandboxing settings systemd provides like these ones by default, since they know best which kind of address families or namespaces a specific daemon needs.