Question

The AppArmor documentation mentions giving applications the ability to execute other programs with or without enviroment scrubbing. Apparently a scrubbed environment is more secure, but the documentation doesn’t seem to specify exactly how environment scrubbing happens.

What is environment scrubbing and what does AppArmor do to scrub the environment?

Answer 1

“Environment scrubbing” is the removal of various “dangerous” environment variables which may be used to affect the behaviour of a binary – for example, LD_PRELOAD can be used to make the dynamic linker pull in code which can make essentially arbitrary changes to the running of a program; some variables can be set to cause trace output to files with well-known names; etc.

This scrubbing is normally performed for setuid/setgid binaries as a security measure, but the kernel provides a hook to allow security modules to enable it for arbitrary other binaries as well.

The kernel’s ELF loader code uses this hook to set the AT_SECURE entry in the “auxiliary vector” of information which is passed to the binary. (See here and here for the implementation of this hook in the AppArmor code.)

As execution starts in userspace, the dynamic linker picks up this value and uses it to set the __libc_enable_secure flag; you’ll see that the same routine also contains the code which sets this flag for setuid/setgid binaries. (There is equivalent code elsewhere for binaries which are statically linked.)

__libc_enable_secure affects a number of places in the main body of the dynamic linker code, and causes a list of specific environment variables to be removed.