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net-admin-helper

A helper program for network administration tasks that require privileged operations.

Network administration tasks such as configuring the firewall, modifying routing tables, or setting up VPN connections require special privileges, either full root (administrator) rights or a specific capability (CAP_NET_ADMIN on Linux).

If these tasks need to be done by an application that also does many other things (e.g. drawing a GUI, handling network requests) then that entire application needs elevated privileges, at least initially. This is problematic in general because it increases the attack surface, and it's practically impossible if the application is written in an interpreted language such as Python or Java.

A better solution then is to create a separate program which implements exactly the network administration tasks needed by the application, can be installed with the required capabilities enabled, and can then be called from the unprivileged process. Thus, if an attacker were to breach the application then they will be able to perform the given network administration tasks (which is inevitable) but nothing else.

net-admin-helper is that program. It can currently do container-to-container WireGuard connections, and is easy to extend with new functionality. It is compiled with only the required tasks enabled, then given limited capabilities and called from the application. Its inputs and outputs are designed for easy communication with the calling application. net-admin-helper validates all its inputs and is paranoid about checking for and handling errors in everything it does.

net-admin-helper relies on standard utilities like ip and wg to perform its tasks, rather than talking directly to the kernel. This makes it easier to implement new tasks given a sequence of shell commands; the Linux's rtnetlink interface isn't terribly well documented.

Supported operating systems

  • GNU/Linux with Linux kernel >=4.3 and glibc >=2.25

Configuration

net-admin-helper is configured by editing (or overwriting) the file config.h. In this file, individual tasks can be enabled, and the paths to the helper programs are configured. (net-admin-helper does not use the PATH environment variable, for reasons of security). See the file itself for detailed instructions.

Also see docs/ for some scenarios and which tasks are needed to support them.

Building and installing

Because net-admin-helper is capabilities-aware, it needs to link to the libcap library. Installing the libcap-dev or libcap-devel package should make it available. You'll also need libcap2-bin or libcap to be able to give the compiled binary the needed capabilities.

Once these are available, net-admin-helper can be built by running make:

net-admin-helper$ make

This will produce an executable in bin/. Next, this executable needs to be given the required capabilities:

net-admin-helper$ sudo make setcap

Note that this requires root access.

You can now run the executable where it is, or install it together with your application.

Most tasks supported by net-admin-helper require the ip command, which is available in the iproute2 package on most GNU/Linux distributions. If you want to run any tasks involving WireGuard then you'll need to install the wireguard-tools package as well to make the wg command available.

Using from an application

All you need to be able to do is to run an external command, passing it command line arguments and obtaining the exit code and standard output and standard error streams. For example in Python:

import subprocess


result = subprocess.run(
        ['net-admin-helper', 'cwg_destroy', '1234', '10', '0'],
        encoding='utf-8', capture_output=True)

if result.returncode != 0:
    error_message = result.stderr
    # log error
    # raise or otherwise handle

output = result.stdout
# use output, if applicable

Extending with new tasks

  • Find the source file the task belongs in, or make a new one
  • Add the ENABLE_<NEW_TASK> block to the header
  • Documentation
    • Can be skipped if -lazy- time-constrained
    • Define SYNOPSIS_<NEW_TASK>
    • Define USAGE_<NEW_TASK>
  • Implementation
    • Define DISPATCH_<NEW_TASK>
    • Declare the function
    • In the .c file, implement the function, using functions from validation.h, capabilities.h and subprocess.h
    • Add usage and dispatch to main.c

Authors

  • Lourens Veen (Netherlands eScience Center)

Legal

net-admin-helper is Copyright 2021 Netherlands eScience Center and University of Amsterdam.

Licensed under the Apache License 2.0.