Disallowing the dynamic loading of agents by default (revised)

[David M. Lloyd]

On 04/05/2017 11:15 AM, mark.reinhold at oracle.com wrote:
> Thanks to everyone for the quick feedback on this topic, and especially
> to Andrew for the constructive dialogue.
>
> Here's a revised proposal:
>
>   - Define a new VM option, `-XX:+EnableDynamicAgentLoading`, that's
>     on by default in JDK 9 but off by default in JDK 10.
>
>     This will allow launch scripts that use this option on JDK 10 to
>     work on JDK 9 without change, and will allow early testing of the
>     JDK 10 behavior on JDK 9.
>
>   - Revise the `com.sun.tools.attach` API to forbid attachment to the
>     current process or to an ancestor of the current process, and
>     define a read-only system property that allows such attachment to
>     be enabled via the command line.

This is just plain weird from a security perspective, to say that 
unrelated processes have more privilege to control the current process 
than processes that are closely related.

Anyway this is yet another case where arbitrary artificial hurdles are 
put in place for the purpose of human behavior modification.  Such 
hurdles can always be bypassed, generally resulting in even uglier 
situations that the one you're trying to avoid.  In this case I can just 
fire a child process and then attach to it from the parent.  Or fire off 
two sibling processes and have one attach to the other.  Nothing is 
being saved here.

>     This will discourage the inadvertent use of libraries that, for
>     better or for worse, intentionally violate strong encapsulation.
>
>   - Enhance the `-jar` launcher option so that if the JAR file being
>     launched contains a `Premain-Class` attribute then it's launched
>     as both an application and as an agent for that application.
>
>     This will allow `java -jar foo.jar` to be used in place of the
>     more verbose `java -javaagent:foo.jar -jar foo.jar` [1].
>
> Taken together, these changes are intended to enable the continued use
> of legitimate dynamically-loaded agents without change on JDK 9 and with
> a small change on JDK 10.  That later change will align the treatment of
> such agents with the other means of breaking encapsulation (`--add-opens`,
> etc.) in order to ensure integrity by default for all code.
>
> This proposal does not attempt to lock down platform classes as distinct
> from user classes.  Many agents have legitimate reasons to transform
> platform classes, so an additional mechanism to protect those classes
> does not appear to be worthwhile.
>
> Comments?
>
> - Mark
>
>
> [1] http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jigsaw-dev/2017-April/012000.html
>

-- 
- DML