fix(home-assistant): confine the mDNS relay's receive sockets to net1
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Both sockets bound the wildcard, so they accepted datagrams on eth0 as well as
net1. The namespace CNP grants every pod in home-assistant unrestricted access
to every other pod on every port, so any sibling pod could reach :5353 over the
cluster network and have records forwarded into HA's zeroconf cache. The
header comment described only the IoT-VLAN side of that.

so-bindtodevice=net1 confines delivery to datagrams that actually arrived on
the IoT VLAN interface. Binding to net1's address is still not possible — it is
DHCP-leased and unknown at exec time — but binding to the device gets the same
confinement without needing the address, and needs no capability: verified that
SO_BINDTODEVICE succeeds as uid 65534 with all capabilities dropped. Also
verified it costs no reception: 6 packets in 12s with the option, 6 in 12s
without.

Scope of what this fixes, stated exactly: the relay is not what makes HA's
zeroconf reachable from inside the cluster. HA binds :5353 on its pod address
(v4) and the wildcard (v6) — confirmed in /proc/net/udp and /proc/net/udp6 —
and the namespace CNP already permits any sibling pod to reach it directly.
This removes a second route to that listener, not the first.

Adds ipv6-v6only=1 on the v6 socket. The two containers share the pod's network
namespace, so a dual-stack v6 socket overlaps the v4 container's port. Measured
behaviour without it was no contention — both bound cleanly and the v4 receiver
kept taking packets throughout the v6 container's lifetime — so this is not a
latent bug being fixed, but the outcome depended on the kernel's bindv6only
default rather than on anything the manifest said. The roles are now explicit.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
2026-08-26 17:11:33 +02:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent 14e45a540c
commit 664bc72eb4
@@ -48,16 +48,32 @@
#
# EXPOSURE
#
# socat binds :5353 on all interfaces, net1 included, because net1's address
# is DHCP-leased and unknown at exec time — there is nothing to bind to. Any
# host on the IoT VLAN can therefore send this port a datagram and have it
# forwarded into HA's zeroconf cache. That is the same trust already extended
# to genuine mDNS from that segment, which any device there can equally forge;
# the relay widens who can reach HA's listener, not what can be claimed. Note
# that macvlan traffic bypasses Cilium policy entirely, so the namespace CNP
# does not constrain this interface.
# The receive sockets carry so-bindtodevice=net1, so only datagrams that
# actually arrived on the IoT VLAN interface are delivered. Binding to net1's
# address instead is not possible — it is DHCP-leased and unknown at exec time
# — but binding to the device achieves the same confinement without needing to
# know the address, and needs no capability: SO_BINDTODEVICE succeeds as an
# unprivileged uid here.
#
# Nothing else is exposed: the container runs socat and only socat, with no
# Without it socat would bind the wildcard, and since the namespace CNP grants
# every pod in home-assistant unrestricted access to every other pod on every
# port, any sibling pod could reach :5353 over the cluster network and have
# records forwarded into HA's zeroconf cache.
#
# What remains, and cannot be closed here: any host on the IoT VLAN can send
# this port a datagram. That is the same trust already extended to genuine
# mDNS from that segment, which any device there can equally forge — the relay
# widens who can reach HA's listener, not what can be claimed. macvlan traffic
# bypasses Cilium policy entirely, so the namespace CNP does not constrain
# this interface either way.
#
# Note that the relay is not what makes HA's zeroconf reachable from inside
# the cluster: HA binds :5353 on the pod address (v4) and the wildcard (v6),
# and the namespace CNP already permits any sibling pod to reach it directly.
# Confining the relay removes a second route to that listener; it does not
# remove the first.
#
# Nothing else is exposed: the containers run socat and only socat, with no
# second listener to reach.
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
@@ -124,7 +140,7 @@ spec:
imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
args:
- -u
- "UDP4-RECV:5353,ip-add-membership=224.0.0.251:net1,reuseaddr"
- "UDP4-RECV:5353,ip-add-membership=224.0.0.251:net1,so-bindtodevice=net1,reuseaddr"
- "UDP4-SENDTO:home-assistant-mdns.home-assistant.svc.cluster.local:5353"
# No probes. socat is a single process with no health surface: if it
# exits, the container exits and the kubelet restarts it, which is the
@@ -146,12 +162,19 @@ spec:
# link-local and the kernel's automatic link-local address on the
# macvlan is sufficient to receive on it. Whether v30iot hands out
# global v6 addresses does not affect reception here.
#
# ipv6-v6only=1 keeps this socket to v6 only. Both containers share the
# pod's network namespace, and a dual-stack v6 socket would overlap the
# v4 container's port. Measured behaviour without it was no contention —
# the v4 receiver kept taking packets while the v6 one ran — but that
# depends on the kernel's bindv6only default rather than on anything
# stated here, so the roles are made explicit instead of inherited.
- name: socat-ipv6
image: alpine/socat:1.8.0.3@sha256:beb4a68d9e4fe6b0f21ea774a0fde6c31f580dde6368939ed70100c5385b015e
imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
args:
- -u
- "UDP6-RECV:5353,ipv6-join-group=[ff02::fb]:net1,reuseaddr"
- "UDP6-RECV:5353,ipv6-join-group=[ff02::fb]:net1,so-bindtodevice=net1,ipv6-v6only=1,reuseaddr"
- "UDP6-SENDTO:home-assistant-mdns.home-assistant.svc.cluster.local:5353"
resources:
requests: