[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]
Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2017 13:47:07 -0700
From: Kees Cook <keescook@...omium.org>
To: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
Cc: "Roberts, William C" <william.c.roberts@...el.com>, "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@....edu>,
"Tobin C. Harding" <me@...in.cc>, Tejun Heo <tj@...nel.org>,
Jordan Glover <Golden_Miller83@...tonmail.ch>, Greg KH <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>,
Petr Mladek <pmladek@...e.com>, Joe Perches <joe@...ches.com>, Ian Campbell <ijc@...lion.org.uk>,
Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky@...il.com>,
"kernel-hardening@...ts.openwall.com" <kernel-hardening@...ts.openwall.com>,
Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@....com>, Will Deacon <will.deacon@....com>,
Steven Rostedt <rostedt@...dmis.org>, Chris Fries <cfries@...gle.com>,
Dave Weinstein <olorin@...gle.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC V2 0/6] add more kernel pointer filter options
On Fri, Oct 13, 2017 at 1:22 PM, Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@...ux-foundation.org> wrote:
> I'm acknowledging that it's a complete hack that may have made sense
> in a particular setting, but it's not one that actually fixes any real
> security issues, and in particular, it's one that has likely held
> people back from doing *real* security.
>
> And as a maintainer of the kernel, to me that "long term actual
> development" is a whole lot more important than "silly hack that might
> close a random escape or two".
>
> So yes, I'm actually opposed to the global flag, because we seriously
> have 6+ years of reality staring us in the face: it fixed exactly
> nothing. It fixed /proc/kallsyms,m but did so _badly_. It fixed a
> handful of other places. But it didn't really and truly add any real
> security.
>
> Are people really in denial about this? Really?
I totally agree that %pK isn't actually useful. (I think of %pK and a
global flag controlling %p behavior as separate things.) The original
patch I was talking about fully acknowledges this (%pK not actually
working) and was about changing %p behavior. Some other solution was
needed that didn't drive developers into using %x for everything
instead.
> The whole "let's make %p print a hashed address" is not the real
> security part. That's just the "make it easy to do something secure by
> _default_" part. The real security is actually scanning for bad
> things, not profiling the escape sequences.
So yes, it's trivial to scan for stuff in dmesg, but it's much less
trivial to find the cases where some /proc entry only has %p reports
under certain runtime conditions. (e.g. print the allocation address
of a pending wifi association timer or something: visible only during
a brief window, and something not obvious to a casual scan of /proc
entry contents, but an attacker might be able to influence and peek
at.)
I'm also fine with eliminating the use of %p in source, but that's a
serious game of whack-a-mole, and I don't think it scales. So, yeah,
while I do like the %p-hash idea, I remain concerned that we'll just
have this whole discussion again in a few years, trying to figure out
what to do about the now heavily-used %x.
Is the correct path to:
- unconditionally convert %p to reporting a 32-bit hash
- actively start removing as much %p use as possible
- do something to discourage %x on pointers (checkpatch.pl?)
Can we do something more about %x?
Do we want to remove %pK also?
-Kees
--
Kees Cook
Pixel Security
Powered by blists - more mailing lists
Confused about mailing lists and their use?
Read about mailing lists on Wikipedia
and check out these
guidelines on proper formatting of your messages.
