The commit 74d00a8d (libsepol/cil:
Detect degenerate inheritance and exit with an error) detects the
use of inheritance (mostly by the secilc-fuzzer and not in any real
policies) that results in the exponential growth of the policy through
the copying of blocks that takes place with inheritance in CIL.
Unfortunately, the check takes place during the pass when all the
blocks are being copied, so it is possible to consume all of a system's
memory before an error is produced.

The new check happens in two parts. First, a check is made while the
block inheritance is being linked to the block it will inherit. In
this check, all of the parent nodes of the inheritance rule up to the
root node are checked and if enough of these blocks are being inherited
(>= CIL_DEGENERATE_INHERITANCE_DEPTH), then a flag is set for a more
in-depth check after the pass. This in-depth check will determine the
number of potential inheritances that will occur when resolving the
all of the inheritance rules. If this value is greater than
CIL_DEGENERATE_INHERITANCE_GROWTH * the original number of inheritance
rules and greater than CIL_DEGENERATE_INHERITANCE_MINIMUM (which is
set to 0x1 << CIL_DEGENERATE_INHERITANCE_DEPTH), then degenerate
inheritance is determined to have occurred and an error result will
be returned.

Since the potential number of inheritances can quickly be an extremely
large number, the count of potential inheritances is aborted as soon
as the threshold for degenerate inheritance has been exceeded.

Normal policies should rarely, if ever, have the in-depth check occur.
Signed-off-by: James Carter <jwcart2@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Nicolas Iooss <nicolas.iooss@m4x.org>