linux/include
David Herrmann c7dc65737c Input: evdev - add EVIOCREVOKE ioctl
If we have multiple sessions on a system, we normally don't want
background sessions to read input events. Otherwise, it could capture
passwords and more entered by the user on the foreground session. This is
a real world problem as the recent XMir development showed:
  http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/27327.html

We currently rely on sessions to release input devices when being
deactivated. This relies on trust across sessions. But that's not given on
usual systems. We therefore need a way to control which processes have
access to input devices.

With VTs the kernel simply routed them through the active /dev/ttyX. This
is not possible with evdev devices, though. Moreover, we want to avoid
routing input-devices through some dispatcher-daemon in userspace (which
would add some latency).

This patch introduces EVIOCREVOKE. If called on an evdev fd, this revokes
device-access irrecoverably for that *single* open-file. Hence, once you
call EVIOCREVOKE on any dup()ed fd, all fds for that open-file will be
rather useless now (but still valid compared to close()!). This allows us
to pass fds directly to session-processes from a trusted source. The
source keeps a dup()ed fd and revokes access once the session-process is
no longer active.
Compared to the EVIOCMUTE proposal, we can avoid the CAP_SYS_ADMIN
restriction now as there is no way to revive the fd again. Hence, a user
is free to call EVIOCREVOKE themself to kill the fd.

Additionally, this ioctl allows multi-layer access-control (again compared
to EVIOCMUTE which was limited to one layer via CAP_SYS_ADMIN). A middle
layer can simply request a new open-file from the layer above and pass it
to the layer below. Now each layer can call EVIOCREVOKE on the fds to
revoke access for all layers below, at the expense of one fd per layer.

There's already ongoing experimental user-space work which demonstrates
how it can be used:
  http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2013-August/012897.html

Signed-off-by: David Herrmann <dh.herrmann@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Dmitry Torokhov <dmitry.torokhov@gmail.com>
2013-09-07 12:53:20 -07:00
..
acpi ACPI / PM: Allow device power states to be used for CONFIG_PM unset 2013-05-22 00:19:28 +02:00
asm-generic arch, mm: Remove tlb_fast_mode() 2013-06-06 10:07:26 +09:00
clocksource ARM: late Exynos multiplatform changes 2013-05-07 11:28:42 -07:00
crypto crypto: sha512 - Expose generic sha512 routine to be callable from other modules 2013-04-25 21:00:57 +08:00
drm Merge branch 'drm-radeon-sun-hainan' of git://people.freedesktop.org/~airlied/linux 2013-05-21 08:50:57 -07:00
dt-bindings
keys
linux Merge branch 'next' into for-linus 2013-09-06 20:23:44 -07:00
math-emu
media Merge branch 'topic/omap3isp' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/mchehab/linux-media 2013-05-01 09:57:04 -07:00
memory
misc
net net_sched: restore "overhead xxx" handling 2013-06-02 22:22:35 -07:00
pcmcia
ras
rdma
rxrpc
scsi Merge branch 'postmerge' into for-linus 2013-05-10 07:54:01 -07:00
sound sound fixes for v3.10-rc1 2013-05-10 07:51:56 -07:00
target target: Propigate up ->cmd_kref put return via transport_generic_free_cmd 2013-05-31 01:21:23 -07:00
trace Fixed regressions (two stability regressions and a performance 2013-05-14 09:30:54 -07:00
uapi Input: evdev - add EVIOCREVOKE ioctl 2013-09-07 12:53:20 -07:00
video Merge branch 'fbdev-3.10-fixes' of git://gitorious.org/linux-omap-dss2/linux into linux-fbdev/for-3.10-fixes 2013-05-29 17:00:34 +08:00
xen xenbus: delay xenbus frontend resume if xenstored is not running 2013-05-29 09:04:19 -04:00
Kbuild UAPI: remove empty Kbuild files 2013-04-30 17:04:09 -07:00