Linux user namespace management wit CRI-O in Kubernetes

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In this blog post I will introduce user namespaces, then I will show you how you can use it in Kubernetes.

What are user namespaces?

As we talked about in a prewious post container engines uses the linux kernels namespaces to isolate the conatiners. For example, two containers in different network namespaces will not see each other’s network interfaces. Two containers in different PID namespaces will not see each other’s processes.

On Linux, all files and all processes are owned by a specific user id and group id, usually defined in /etc/passwd and /etc/group. User namespaces are isolates user IDs and group IDs from each other. With user namespaces the container engine can let a container only see a subset of the host’s user IDs and group IDs.

Why this is important

By default the container engines share the same user namespace in the container as the host use. So If I use the root user with the 0 user ID in a container it is the same ID as he root user use on the host. So if an unprivileged user on a hos has the ability to run containers with this security loophole it can make changes on the host without sudo privilege on the host:

$ docker run -v /etc/:/etc/ -ti ubuntu
root@6803a66e58d0:/# passwd
New password:
Retype new password:
passwd: password updated successfully
root@6803a66e58d0:/# exit

$ su -
Password:
Hello, DevOpsTales! You are a sysadmin now
#

The solution rootless mode

The firs container engine that can be used in rootless mode was podman they used the subuid and bunguid to run containers in rootless mode. Normally a user or group has only one ID, but wit subuid and bunguid you can allocate an ID segment for the user or groupe.

====================================================================
User Specification
====================================================================

# The following below commands allocates the UIDs and GIDs from 100000to 165535 to the podman user and group respectively.

$ sudo touch /etc/{subgid,subuid}
$ sudo usermod --add-subuids 100000-165535 --add-subgids 100000-165535 ${USER}
$ grep ${USER} /etc/subuid /etc/subgid
/etc/subuid:${USER}:100000:65536
/etc/subgid:${USER}:100000:65536

Now bot podman and docker can be installed in rootless mode. The only problem with rootless mode that Kubernets can not use it.

Kubernetes user namespace management with CRI-O

To solve this problem CRI-O added support for user namespace configuration through pod annotations.

VERSION=1.25

sudo curl -L -o /etc/yum.repos.d/devel_kubic_libcontainers_stable.repo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:kubic:libcontainers:stable/CentOS_8/devel:kubic:libcontainers:stable.repo
sudo curl -L -o /etc/yum.repos.d/devel_kubic_libcontainers_stable_cri-o_${VERSION}.repo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/kubic:/libcontainers:/stable:/cri-o:/${VERSION}/CentOS_8/devel:kubic:libcontainers:stable:cri-o:${VERSION}.repo

yum install cri-o cri-tools nano wget iproute-tc

cat <<'EOF' | sudo tee /etc/modules-load.d/crio.conf > /dev/null
overlay
br_netfilter
EOF

modprobe overlay
modprobe br_netfilter

cat <<EOF >  /etc/sysctl.d/k8s.conf
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-ip6tables = 1
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-iptables = 1
net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv4.ip_forward                 = 1
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-ip6tables = 1
EOF

sysctl --system

free -h
swapoff -a
swapoff -a
sed -i.bak -r 's/(.+ swap .+)/#\1/' /etc/fstab
free -h

mkdir /etc/crio/crio.conf.d/
cat <<EOF > /etc/crio/crio.conf.d/01-userns-workload.conf
[crio.runtime.workloads.userns]
activation_annotation = "io.kubernetes.cri-o.userns-mode"
allowed_annotations = ["io.kubernetes.cri-o.userns-mode"]
EOF

nano /etc/containers/registries.conf
unqualified-search-registries = ["registry.access.redhat.com", "registry.redhat.io", "quay.io", "docker.io"]

sed -i.bak -r 's/network_backend = "cni"/#network_backend = ""/' /usr/share/containers/containers.conf

Change the pod-subnet 10.244.0.0/16 in the cri-o bridge config /etc/cni/net.d/100-crio-bridge.conf

nano /etc/cni/net.d/100-crio-bridge.conf
{
    "cniVersion": "0.3.1",
    "name": "crio",
    "type": "bridge",
    "bridge": "cni0",
    "isGateway": true,
    "ipMasq": true,
    "hairpinMode": true,
    "ipam": {
	"type": "host-local",
        "routes": [
            { "dst": "0.0.0.0/0" },
            { "dst": "1100:200::1/24" }
        ],
	"ranges": [
            [{ "subnet": "10.244.0.0/16" }]
        ]
    }
}

The CRI-O will run the containers with the containers user so I need to create /etc/subuid and /etc/subgid on nodes.

SubUID/GIDs are a range of user/group IDs that a user is allowed to use.

echo "containers:200000:268435456" >> /etc/subuid
echo "containers:200000:268435456" >> /etc/subgid

First I created the id ranges for root user because CRI-O runs as root Fu the I find the fallowing ERROR in the CRI-O log:

Cannot find mappings for user \"containers\": No subuid
ranges found for user \"containers\" in /etc/subuid"

Install Kubernetes

cat <<EOF > /etc/yum.repos.d/kubernetes.repo
[kubernetes]
name=Kubernetes
baseurl=https://packages.cloud.google.com/yum/repos/kubernetes-el7-x86_64
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
repo_gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://packages.cloud.google.com/yum/doc/yum-key.gpg https://packages.cloud.google.com/yum/doc/rpm-package-key.gpg
EOF

CRIP_VERSION=$(crio --version | egrep ^Version | awk '{print $2}')
yum install kubelet-$CRIP_VERSION kubeadm-$CRIP_VERSION kubectl-$CRIP_VERSION -y

IP=192.168.200.10
# for multi interface configuration
echo 'KUBELET_EXTRA_ARGS="--node-ip='$IP'"' > /etc/sysconfig/kubelet

systemctl enable kubelet.service
systemctl enable --now crio
kubeadm config images pull --cri-socket=unix:///var/run/crio/crio.sock --kubernetes-version=$CRIP_VERSION
kubeadm init --pod-network-cidr=10.244.0.0/16 --apiserver-advertise-address=$IP  --kubernetes-version=$CRIP_VERSION --cri-socket=unix:///var/run/crio/crio.sock

mkdir -p $HOME/.kube
sudo cp -i /etc/kubernetes/admin.conf $HOME/.kube/config
sudo chown $(id -u):$(id -g) $HOME/.kube/config


crictl info
kubectl get node -o wide
kubectl get po --all-namespaces

kubectl apply -f https://github.com/coreos/flannel/raw/master/Documentation/kube-flannel.yml

kubectl taint nodes --all node-role.kubernetes.io/master-
kubectl taint nodes --all node-role.kubernetes.io/control-plane-

and docker/containerd can be install in rootless mode. user namespaces it.

Demo time

nano pod.yaml
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: not-userns-pod
  annotations:
    io.kubernetes.cri-o.userns-mode: "auto" # this will not work
spec:
  containers:
  - command:
    - sleep
    - 2d
    image: registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-minimal
    name: not-userns-ctr
    imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
status: {}
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: standard-pod
spec:
  containers:
  - command:
    - sleep
    - 3d
    image: registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-minimal
    name: not-userns-ctr
    imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
status: {}

kubectl aply -f pod.yaml

ps -eo args,pid | grep sleep
sleep 2d                      57277
sleep 3d                      58878
grep --color=auto sleep       58918

# standard container
cat /proc/58878/uid_map
         0          0 4294967295

# namespaced container
cat /proc/57277/uid_map
         0     200000      65536

As you can see the container’s uid range is shifted.