Operating systems

This is a deep dive into systems programing using Python. For those unfamiliar with programming, systems programming sits on top of hardware / electronics design, firmware programming and operating system programming. However, it is not applications programming which targets mostly end users. Systems programming targets the running system. Mr. Yadav of Dark Bears has an article Systems Programming is Hard to Do – But Somebody’s Got to Do it, where he describes the limitations and requirements of doing so.

Typically systems programming is done with C, C++, Perl or Bash. As Python is gaining popularity, I definitely want to take a swing at systems programming with Python. In fact, there aren''t many resources about the topic in the entire Internet.

Requirements

This is the list of basic requirements I have for a Python-based system daemon:

• Run as service: Must run as a Linux daemon, https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/daemon.7.html
  • Start runing on system boot and stop running on system shutdown
• Modern: systemd-compatible, https://systemd.io/
  • Not interested in ancient SysV init support anymore, https://danielmiessler.com/study/the-difference-between-system-v-and-systemd/
• Modern: D-bus -connected
  • Service provided will have an interface on system D-bus, https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/dbus/
  • All Linux systems are built on top of D-bus, I absolutely want to be compatible
• Monitoring: Must support systemd watchdog, https://0pointer.de/blog/projects/watchdog.html
  • Surprisingly many out-of-box Linux daemons won't support this. This is most likely because they're still SysV-init based and haven't modernized their operation.
  • I most definitely want to have this feature!
• Security: Must use Linux capabilities to run only with necessary permissions, https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/capabilities.7.html
• Security: Must support SElinux to run only with required permissions, https://github.com/SELinuxProject/selinux-notebook/blob/main/src/selinux_overview.md
• Isolation: Must be independent from system Python
  • venv
  • virtualenv
  • Any possible changes to system Python won't affect daemon or its dependencies at all.
• Modern: Asynchronous Python
  • Event-based is the key to success.
  • D-bus and systemd watchdog pretty much nail this. Absolutely must be asynchronous.
• Packaging: Installation from RPM-package
  • This is the only one I'll support for any forseeable future.
  • The package will contain all necessary parts, libraries and dependencies to run a self-contained daemon.

That's a tall order. Selecting only two or three of those are enough to add tons of complexity to my project. Also, I initially expected somebody else in The Net to be doing this same or something similar. Looks like I was wrong. Most systems programmers love sticking to their old habits and being at SysV-init state with their synchronous C / Perl -daemons.

Scope / Target daemon

I've previously blogged about running an own email server and fighting spam. Let's automate lot of those tasks and while automating, create a Maildir monitor of junk mail -folder.

This is the project I wrote for that purpose: Spammer Blocker

Toolkit will query for AS-number of spam-sending SMTP-server. Typically I'll copy/paste the IP-address from SpamCop's report and produce a CIDR-table for Postfix. The table will add headers to email to-be-stored so that possible Procmail / Maildrop can act on it, if so needed. As junk mail -folder is constantly monitored, any manually moved mail will be processed also.

Having these features bring your own Linux box spam handling capabilities pretty close to any of those free-but-spy-all -services commonly used by everybody.

Addressing the list of requirements

Let's take a peek on what I did to meet above requirements.

Systemd daemon

This is nearly trivial. See service definition in spammer-reporter.service.

What's in the file is your run-of-the-mill systemd service with appropriate unit, service and install -definitions. That triplet makes a Linux run a systemd service as a daemon.

Python venv isolation

For any Python-developer this is somewhat trivial. You create the environment box/jail, install requirements via setup.py and that's it. You're done. This same isolation mechanism will be used later for packaging and deploying the ready-made daemon into a system.

What's missing or to-do is start using a pyproject.toml. That is something I'm yet to learn. Obviously there is always something. Nobody, nowhere is "ready". Ever.

Asynchronous code

Talking to systemd watchdog and providing a service endpoint on system D-bus requires little bit effort. Read: lots of it.

To get a D-bus service properly running, I'll first become asynchronous. For that I'll initiate an event-loop dbus.mainloop.glib. As there are multiple options for event loop, that is the only one actually working. Majority of Python-code won't work with Glib, they need asyncio. For that I'll use asyncio_glib to pair the GLib's loop with asyncio. It took me while to learn and understand how to actually achieve that. When successfully done, everything needed will run in a single asynchronous event loop. Great success!

With solid foundation, As the main task I'll create an asynchronous task for monitoring filesystem changes and run it in a forever-loop. See inotify(7) for non-Python command. See asyncinotify-library for more details of the Pythonic version. What I'll be monitoring is users' Maildirs configured to receive junk/spam. When there is a change, a check is made to see if change is about new spam received.

For side tasks, there is a D-bus service provider. If daemon is running under systemd also the required watchdog -handler is attached to event loop as a periodic task. Out-of-box my service-definition will state max. 20 seconds between watchdog notifications (See service Type=notify and  WatchdogSec=20s). In daemon configuration file spammer-reporter.toml, I'll use 15 seconds as the interval. That 5 seconds should be plenty of headroom.

Documentation of systemd.service for WatchdogSec states following:

If the time between two such calls is larger than the configured time, then the service is placed in a failed state and it will be terminated

For any failed service, there is the obvious Restart=on-failure.

If for ANY possible reason, the process is stuck, systemd scaffolding will take control of the failure and act instantly. That's resiliency and self-healing in my books!

Security: Capabilities

My obvious choice would be to not run as root. As my main task is to provide a D-bus service while reading all users' mailboxes, there is absolutely no way of avoiding root permissions. Trust me! I tried everything I could find to grant nobody's process with enough permissions to do all that. No avail. See the documenatiion about UID / GID rationale.

As standard root will have waaaaaay too much power (especially if mis-applied) I'll take some of those away. There is a yet rarely used mechanism of capabilities(7) in a Linux. My documentation of what CapabilityBoundingSet=CAP_AUDIT_WRITE CAP_DAC_READ_SEARCH CAP_IPC_LOCK CAP_SYS_NICE means in system service definition is also in the source code. That set grants the process for permission to monitor, read and write any users' files.

There are couple of other super-user permissions left. Most not needed powers a regular root would have are stripped, tough. If there is a security leak and my daemon is used to do something funny, quite lot of the potential impact is already mitigated as the process isn't allowed to do much.

Security: SElinux

For even more improved security, I do define a policy in spammer-block_policy.te. All my systems are hardened and run SElinux in enforcing -mode. If something leaks, there is a limiting box in-place already. In 2014, I wrote a post about a security flaw with no impact on a SElinux-hardened system.

The policy will allow my daemon to:

• read and write FIFO-files
• create new unix-sockets
• use STDIN, STDOUT and STDERR streams
• read files in /etc/, note: read! not write
• read I18n (or internationalization) files on the system
• use capabilities
• use TCP and UDP -sockets
• acess D-bus -sockets in /run/
• access D-bus watchdog UDP-socket
• access user passwd information on the system via SSSd
• read and search user's home directories as mail is stored in them, note: not write
• send email via SMTPd
• create, write, read and delete temporary files in /tmp/

Above list is a comprehensive requirement of accesses in a system to meet the given task of monitoring received emails and act on determined junk/spam. As the policy is very carefully crafted not to allow any destruction, writing, deletion or manging outside /tmp/, in my thinking having such a hardening will make the daemon very secure.

Yes, in /tmp/, there is stuff that can be altered with potential security implications. First you have to access the process. While hacking the daemon, make sure to keep the event-loop running or systemd will zap the process within next 20 seconds or less. I really did consider quite a few scenarios if, and only if, something/somebody pops the cork on my daemon.

RPM Packaging

To wrap all of this into a nice packages, I'm using rpmenv. This toolkit will automatically wrap anything needed by the daemon into a nice virtualenv and deploy that to /usr/libexec/spammer-block/. See rpm.json for details.

SElinux-policy has an own spammer-block_policy_selinux.spec. Having these two in separate packages is mandatory as the mechanisms to build the boxes are completely different. Also, this is the typical approach on other pieces of software. Not everybody has strict requirements to harden their systems.

Where to place an entire virtualenv in a Linux? That one is a ball-buster. RPM Packaging Guide really doesn't say how to handle your Python-based system daemons. Remember? Up there ↑, I tried explaining how all of this is rather novel and there isn't much information in The Net regarding this. However, I found somebody asking What is the purpose of /usr/libexec? on Stackexchange and decided that libexec/ is fine for this purpose. I do install shell wrappers into /bin/ to make everybody's life easier. Having entire Python environment there wouldn't be sensible.

Final words

Only time will tell if I made the right design choices. I totally see Python and Rust -based deamons gaining popularity in the future. The obvious difference is Rust is a compiled language like Go, C and C++. Python isn't.