Simon McVittie authored Oct 14, 2019 and Brian May committed Dec 11, 2019

Conceptually, a D-Bus server is really trying to determine the credentials
of (the process that initiated) a connection, not the credentials that
the process had when it sent a particular message. Ideally, it does
this with a getsockopt()-style API that queries the credentials of the
connection's initiator without requiring any particular cooperation from
that process, avoiding a class of possible failures.

The leading '\0' in the D-Bus protocol is primarily a workaround
for platforms where the message-based credentials-passing API is
strictly better than the getsockopt()-style API (for example, on
FreeBSD, SCM_CREDS includes a process ID but getpeereid() does not),
or where the getsockopt()-style API does not exist at all. As a result
libdbus, the reference implementation of D-Bus, does not implement
Linux SCM_CREDENTIALS at all - it has no reason to do so, because the
SO_PEERCRED socket option is equally informative.

This change makes GDBusServer on Linux more closely match the behaviour
of libdbus.

In particular, GNOME/glib#1831

 indicates that when a libdbus client
connects to a GDBus server, recvmsg() sometimes yields a SCM_CREDENTIALS
message with cmsg_data={pid=0, uid=65534, gid=65534}. I think this is
most likely a race condition in the early steps to connect:

        client           server
    connect
                         accept
    send '\0' <- race -> set SO_PASSCRED = 1
                         receive '\0'

If the server wins the race:

        client           server
    connect
                         accept
                         set SO_PASSCRED = 1
    send '\0'
                         receive '\0'

then everything is fine. However, if the client wins the race:

        client           server
    connect
                         accept
    send '\0'
                         set SO_PASSCRED = 1
                         receive '\0'

then the kernel does not record credentials for the message containing
'\0' (because SO_PASSCRED was 0 at the time). However, by the time the
server receives the message, the kernel knows that credentials are
desired. I would have expected the kernel to omit the credentials header
in this case, but it seems that instead, it synthesizes a credentials
structure with a dummy process ID 0, a dummy uid derived from
/proc/sys/kernel/overflowuid and a dummy gid derived from
/proc/sys/kernel/overflowgid.

In an unconfigured GDBusServer, hitting this race condition results in
falling back to DBUS_COOKIE_SHA1 authentication, which in practice usually
succeeds in authenticating the peer's uid. However, we encourage AF_UNIX
servers on Unix platforms to allow only EXTERNAL authentication as a
security-hardening measure, because DBUS_COOKIE_SHA1 relies on a series
of assumptions including a cryptographically strong PRNG and a shared
home directory with no write access by others, which are not necessarily
true for all operating systems and users. EXTERNAL authentication will
fail if the server cannot determine the client's credentials.

In particular, this caused a regression when CVE-2019-14822 was fixed
in ibus, which appears to be resolved by this commit. Qt clients
(which use libdbus) intermittently fail to connect to an ibus server
(which uses GDBusServer), because ibus no longer allows DBUS_COOKIE_SHA1
authentication or non-matching uids.

Signed-off-by: Simon McVittie <smcv@collabora.com>
Closes: GNOME/glib#1831