Bug 199314 - net/haproxy: create haproxy user, install sample config
Summary: net/haproxy: create haproxy user, install sample config
Status: Open
Alias: None
Product: Ports & Packages
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Individual Port(s) (show other bugs)
Version: Latest
Hardware: Any Any
: --- Affects Some People
Assignee: Dmitry Sivachenko
URL:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2015-04-09 15:20 UTC by Mark Felder
Modified: 2018-02-10 14:56 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

See Also:
bugzilla: maintainer-feedback? (demon)


Attachments
haproxy port patch (2.26 KB, patch)
2015-04-09 15:20 UTC, Mark Felder
no flags Details | Diff

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Description Mark Felder freebsd_committer freebsd_triage 2015-04-09 15:20:51 UTC
Created attachment 155368 [details]
haproxy port patch

Hello,

This patch installs a sample config from the EXAMPLES dir already modified to use a new haproxy uid and gid. It also has chroot enabled to the /var/empty directory which should be sufficient.

This should help alleviate damage from a future haproxy exploit as haproxy would not be running as root.

Unfortunately we cannot just force haproxy to always run as root via the rc script as haproxy may need to listen on reserved ports (<1024) to proxy 80, 443, etc.

It would be wise to encourage users in pkg-message to update their configurations to use the haproxy user, but I have not composed such a message.
Comment 1 Dmitry Sivachenko freebsd_committer freebsd_triage 2015-04-19 09:10:30 UTC
I am not sure haproxy reserves its own uid/gid?
Why not run it as www or nobody?
Comment 2 Mark Felder freebsd_committer freebsd_triage 2015-04-21 13:33:24 UTC
If you run other processes on your server as nobody/www and someone compromises haproxy they have access to everything under the www or nobody user.
Comment 3 Dmitry Sivachenko freebsd_committer freebsd_triage 2015-04-21 17:19:05 UTC
I understand.  But there is some common sense also.
Do you plan to modify nginx and apache, for instance, so they use different uids?

In my opinion, installing a sample config with chroot to /var/empty is OK, but having a separate uid is overkill.
Comment 4 Mark Felder freebsd_committer freebsd_triage 2015-04-21 18:19:07 UTC
(In reply to Dmitry Sivachenko from comment #3)

The paranoid OpenBSD approach would be "absolutely, yes, every daemon gets its own uid/gid." and when you look at the UIDs and GIDs file I'm sure we could distill a lot of that down to sharing the www and nobody uid/gids if we really wanted to...

Anyway, it is recommended (and shown in sample configs) to run as non-root and chrooted if possible, so can we at least achieve that so the sample config requires minimal editing for a user to be following best practices?
Comment 5 Dmitry Sivachenko freebsd_committer freebsd_triage 2015-04-25 11:10:03 UTC
Well, looking at actual content of examples/haproxy.cfg I do not see how it can be useful as a prototype of real haproxy config for a starter:  it contains 80 lines of some example backends containing real IPs with some specific options.  The probability for it to be useful prototype is close to zero.  It would be necessary to replace 90% of it's content for it to work in some real case.

I don't think it is useful to install this file just because it contains chroot, uid and gid parameters.

I propose to add some notes about chroot, uid and gid to pkg-message instead to point users to these options.
Comment 6 Mark Felder freebsd_committer freebsd_triage 2015-04-25 12:42:51 UTC
(In reply to Dmitry Sivachenko from comment #5)

Then why does haproxy ship the sample config at all if it's not useful? You could say this about most complex software which provides sample configs. You can't expect it to "work" out of the box because there is no standard deployment, but you can provide them with a sufficient example that they can quickly grasp which changes need to be made and what it is capable of.
Comment 7 Dmitry Sivachenko freebsd_committer freebsd_triage 2015-04-25 12:45:49 UTC
There are a lot of different configs in examples/ directory.

How did you select this one?  Just for filename?  Their content look similar.
Comment 8 Mark Felder freebsd_committer freebsd_triage 2016-03-17 13:01:29 UTC
I just stumbled upon this PR again. Do we agree that we should not be running haproxy as root by default?


Thanks
Comment 9 Dmitry Sivachenko freebsd_committer freebsd_triage 2016-03-17 13:11:47 UTC
I agree. I use www to run haproxy, nobody suites well too.
Comment 10 Mark Felder freebsd_committer freebsd_triage 2016-03-17 13:40:04 UTC
(In reply to Dmitry Sivachenko from comment #9)

Haproxy appears to only allow setting the user in the config file, so if we want to encourage this behavior by default we might have to supply a sample config.
Comment 11 Dmitry Sivachenko freebsd_committer freebsd_triage 2016-03-26 10:37:17 UTC
Well, this is not something FreeBSD-specific.
And FreeBSD ports are intended to make a minimal modification of the original program so it can be used on FreeBSD.

So the proper solution would be to introduce generic sample config file upstream
and the install it on FreeBSD.
Comment 12 Dave Cottlehuber freebsd_committer freebsd_triage 2017-02-28 10:30:28 UTC
This vaulable & simple PR is languishing.

- I'd love to see a bundled haproxy dedicated user to minimise accessible data in the event of an attack. There are arguments for & against this, but I think it's common practice to restrict daemons from seeing other daemon's data.

- The privileged port bind argument is easily resolved via  sysctl net.inet.ip.portrange.reservedhigh=0 which could be a comment in the pkg-message.

- If somebody wishes to submit a simpler haproxy configuration upstream then please do so, but it doesn't need to be something that blocks this PR indefinitely
Comment 13 Dmitry Sivachenko freebsd_committer freebsd_triage 2017-02-28 11:40:04 UTC
(In reply to Dave Cottlehuber from comment #12)

1) "The privileged port bind argument is easily resolved via  sysctl net.inet.ip.portrange.reservedhigh=0"

You can't restrict this to act only for haproxy process, other programs could exploit this too.

2) "If somebody wishes to submit a simpler haproxy configuration upstream then please do so, but it doesn't need to be something that blocks this PR indefinitely"

What do you suggest to do? Just add haproxy:haproxy user to system? As I wrote before, I think it is overkill.  There are several pseudo-users already available for that purpose (do you have both www and nobody already occupied?), and I am not for paranoid OpenBSD's approach.
Also, even if we create such a pseudo-user it won't be of much help to real users, because sample config file will not fit for 99.5% of users and you can "user" and "group" directives to your config file without modifying the port.  Haproxy can be used for a lot of different purposes requiring a lot of completely different configurations.

I see no elegant solution for this now.
Comment 14 Mark Felder freebsd_committer freebsd_triage 2017-03-01 13:48:21 UTC
(In reply to Dmitry Sivachenko from comment #13)

>You can't restrict this to act only for haproxy process, other programs could exploit this too.

We have the capability of restricting this to only the haproxy user in FreeBSD. It's part of the MAC framework. It wouldn't hurt to have this better documented.


Want haproxy user (uid 992) to listen on port 443?


kldload mac_portacl
sysctl security.mac.portacl.rules=uid:992:tcp:443
Comment 15 Dmitry Sivachenko freebsd_committer freebsd_triage 2017-03-02 10:10:14 UTC
Okay, this is another possibility.
But this sounds paranoid: haproxy supports UID change after startup (just like Apache), and it looks like cleaner approach.
Comment 16 Walter Schwarzenfeld freebsd_triage 2018-02-10 14:56:45 UTC
Status?