Simon McVittie authored Oct 18, 2019 and Brian May committed Dec 11, 2019

On Linux, if getsockopt SO_PEERCRED is used on a TCP socket, one
might expect it to fail with an appropriate error like ENOTSUP or
EPROTONOSUPPORT. However, it appears that in fact it succeeds, but
yields a credentials structure with pid 0, uid -1 and gid -1. These
are not real process, user and group IDs that can be allocated to a
real process (pid 0 needs to be reserved to give kill(0) its documented
special semantics, and similarly uid and gid -1 need to be reserved for
setresuid() and setresgid()) so it is not meaningful to signal them to
high-level API users.

An API user with Linux-specific knowledge can still inspect these fields
via g_credentials_get_native() if desired.

Similarly, if SO_PASSCRED is used to receive a SCM_CREDENTIALS message
on a receiving Unix socket, but the sending socket had not enabled
SO_PASSCRED at the time that the message was sent, it is possible
for it to succeed but yield a credentials structure with pid 0, uid
/proc/sys/kernel/overflowuid and gid /proc/sys/kernel/overflowgid. Even
if we were to read those pseudo-files, we cannot distinguish between
the overflow IDs and a real process that legitimately has the same IDs
(typically they are set to 'nobody' and 'nogroup', which can be used
by a real process), so we detect this situation by noticing that
pid == 0, and to save syscalls we do not read the overflow IDs from
/proc at all.

This results in a small API change: g_credentials_is_same_user() now
returns FALSE if we compare two credentials structures that are both
invalid. This seems like reasonable, conservative behaviour: if we cannot
prove that they are the same user, we should assume they are not.

Signed-off-by: Simon McVittie <smcv@collabora.com>