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Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2017 12:34:30 -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 11:11 AM, Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@...ux-foundation.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 13, 2017 at 9:32 AM, Roberts, William C
> <william.c.roberts@...el.com> wrote:
>>
>> I don't particularly hate this idea, and I actually discussed this before with others (not on the list)
>> before approaching it using kptr_restrict. The argument that we had against this approach was
>> that it would push people away from using %p and make it even that much harder to audit.
>
> So I think kptr_restrict was worth trying. I'm not saying it was a bad
> idea when it was introduced.
>
> It's just that it's six years later, we now have the knowledge that
> opt-in doesn't work for this (either), and that we should just admit
> that it didn't work very well.
>
> And even as a "failure", the global flag may well work fine for soem
> uses (ie Android), largely because hardly anybody actually _develops_
> using Android. So it may not have been a failure in that sense, and
> for all I know the Android use-case really sees it as a huge success
> (and extending on it there would have made sense).
That's precisely where this comes from: the original patches from
Tobin (and Greg) were trying to make this extension, based on the work
done in the Android kernels (which was based on work by William, etc).
>> I settled on using kptr_restrict for the ability to enable/disable. One of the use cases
>> we had was that a driver is found to be doing this silly thing, and an admin/user wants
>> to turn it off in dmesg until its fixed.
>
> Hopefully just making %p print out a hash will fix the silly things.
I'm unable to tell if you're universally opposed to a global flag, or
if you're acknowledging that it has use in certain environments.
I get the sense that unconditionally censoring (either through
omission or a hash) of %p will likely drive people to using %x, and
that'll be really hard to audit. (I suppose it'd be possible to build
a compiler plugin that would look for %x uses where the format
argument was cast from a pointer type, but it seems like it'd be best
to avoid even needing such things.)
Having a global flag for censorship of %p means the developer case can
be left unchanged (meaning less migration to %x). Or were you
suggesting a global flag that controls the censorship level (e.g.
something like "none", "hash", "all zero")?
-Kees
--
Kees Cook
Pixel Security
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