The libvirt file system storage driver determines what file to act on by concatenating the pool location with the volume name. If a user is able to pick names like "../../../etc/passwd", then they can escape the bounds of the pool. For that matter, virStoragePoolListVolumes() doesn't descend into subdirectories, so a user really shouldn't use a name with a slash. Normally, only privileged users can coerce libvirt into creating or opening existing files using the virStorageVol APIs; and such users already have full privilege to create any domain XML (so it is not an escalation of privilege). But in the case of fine-grained ACLs, it is feasible that a user can be granted storage_vol:create but not domain:write, and it violates assumptions if such a user can abuse libvirt to access files outside of the storage pool. Therefore, prevent all use of volume names that contain "/", whether or not such a name is actually attempting to escape the pool. This changes things from: $ virsh vol-create-as default ../../../../../../etc/haha --capacity 128 Vol ../../../../../../etc/haha created $ rm /etc/haha to: $ virsh vol-create-as default ../../../../../../etc/haha --capacity 128 error: Failed to create vol ../../../../../../etc/haha error: Requested operation is not valid: volume name '../../../../../../etc/haha' cannot contain '/' Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <eblake(a)redhat.com&gt; --- This has been reviewed on the libvirt security list, where it was assigned a CVE. Fortunately, this could only be used for an escalation of privileges under fine-grained ACLs (which is not an out-of-the-box config). I will go ahead and push this to master as well as all the active maint branches back to the introduction of ACLs. src/storage/storage_backend_fs.c | 10 +++++++++- 1 file changed, 9 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/src/storage/storage_backend_fs.c b/src/storage/storage_backend_fs.c index c71c724..bb3b62a 100644 --- a/src/storage/storage_backend_fs.c +++ b/src/storage/storage_backend_fs.c @@ -1,7 +1,7 @@ /* * storage_backend_fs.c: storage backend for FS and directory handling * - * Copyright (C) 2007-2014 Red Hat, Inc. + * Copyright (C) 2007-2015 Red Hat, Inc. * Copyright (C) 2007-2008 Daniel P. Berrange * * This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or @@ -1057,6 +1057,14 @@ virStorageBackendFileSystemVolCreate(virConnectPtr conn ATTRIBUTE_UNUSED, else vol->type = VIR_STORAGE_VOL_FILE; + /* Volumes within a directory pools are not recursive; do not + * allow escape to ../ or a subdir */ + if (strchr(vol->name, '/')) { + virReportError(VIR_ERR_OPERATION_INVALID, + _("volume name '%s' cannot contain '/'"), vol->name); + return -1; + } + VIR_FREE(vol->target.path); if (virAsprintf(&vol->target.path, "%s/%s", pool->def->target.path, -- 2.4.3