Re: [Qemu-devel] Filtering files passing through MTP devices

[Bandan Das]

Omer Katz <address@hidden> writes:

> What would be a simpler way to do this so that the guest machine would
> still be able to recognize the USB drive?
> Right now we're triggering a script whenever udev recognizes that a USB
> drive is plugged in.
> The script copies the allowed files to a certain folder. The guest has a
> cron job that periodically triggers scp from that folder to the guest.
> That's a very complicated flow and I just described only the flow which
> files are imported. I even omitted some of the moving parts since they are
> irrelevant.
> Long story short our architecture is very complicated because of this
> issue.

If you are using a physical USB drive, where do you envision the emulated
mtp share fits ? One way would be that your udev scripts only copies
files that can be read to the mtp share. Similarly, it only copies back
written files that accept a certain criteria from the share.

Ofcourse, you can try out adding your filter hooks to dev-mtp.c as well
if you think that seems more suited to your use case. I was just
wondering whether reviewers will point it out as too specific. In the
worst case, it will be a in-house change that you will have to maintain
yourself.

Bandan

>
> On Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 7:17 PM Bandan Das <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> Omer Katz <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>> > We're connecting USB drives that we want the guests to copy files from.
>> > The user should only be allowed to copy certain files into the system.
>> > The same thing goes for copying files to the USB drive. We only allow
>> > certain files to be exported from the guest.
>>
>> If I understand your problem correctly, this should be doable by plugging
>> in
>> your logic into usb_mtp_write_data for the write side and
>> usb_mtp_handle_data
>> for the read side. The write probably doesn't need a lot, you trigger an
>> error
>> response the moment your data has something you don't want and discard the
>> new file.
>> For the read, though, you probably have to read the whole file first,
>> which is not what the current code is doing (I think).
>>
>> Apart from that dev-mtp.c is implementing a MTP server based on the MTP
>> spec and adding
>> something like this would be confusing, I also feel that this is too
>> specific a usecase
>> and as Daniel said, there are perhaps simpler ways of doing it.
>>
>> Bandan
>>
>> > On Wed, Apr 25, 2018, 12:57 PM Daniel P. Berrangé <address@hidden>
>> > wrote:
>> >
>> >> On Mon, Apr 23, 2018 at 03:10:32PM +0000, Omer Katz wrote:
>> >> > Hi everyone,
>> >> >
>> >> > We have a use case that requires us to only allow certain files to
>> pass
>> >> > through to the guest machine from USB storage devices.
>> >> >
>> >> > I was told on IRC that such a feature does not exist but the easiest
>> way
>> >> to
>> >> > achieve our goal is to contribute a patch the the MTP device driver
>> since
>> >> > other drivers operate on a filesystem level instead of a file level
>> which
>> >> > is what we need.
>> >>
>> >> IMHO the easiest way to stop the guest accessing files is to simply not
>> >> put them in the directory that you are exporting the guest in the first
>> >> place. If you have a directory that has some files you don't want
>> accessed
>> >> and can't remove them, then perhaps create a second directory and use
>> >> symlinks or hardlinks to pull in files from the original directory.
>> >>
>> >> > The plan is to pass the contents of each file to a program through
>> stdin
>> >> > and decide based on the exit code if the file should be allowed to
>> pass
>> >> > through to the guest or not.
>> >>
>> >> I can't say I like this idea. It is a really very inefficient and heavy
>> >> solution.
>> >>
>> >> > Since this is the first time I'm contributing to QEMU I'd like some
>> >> > guidance to where the filtering code should be.
>> >> > https://github.com/qemu/qemu/blob/master/hw/usb/dev-mtp.c doesn't
>> look
>> >> that
>> >> > complicated but I still need to understand it better to continue.
>> >> > Furthermore, I need to know where to add such a command line option to
>> >> > point QEMU to the filtering program.
>> >> >
>> >> > Would such a patch be accepted if all the requirements above are met?
>> >>
>> >> Can you explain the usage scenario you have in more details, rather than
>> >> just the high level abstract.
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> Regards,
>> >> Daniel
>> >> --
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>> >>
>>