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Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2017 15:11:44 +0300
From: Alexander Popov <alex.popov@...ux.com>
To: Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@....com>, Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>
Cc: kernel-hardening@...ts.openwall.com, keescook@...omium.org,
pageexec@...email.hu, spender@...ecurity.net, Ingo Molnar
<mingo@...nel.org>, Andy Lutomirski <luto@...nel.org>, tycho@...ker.com,
Laura Abbott <labbott@...hat.com>, Ard Biesheuvel
<ard.biesheuvel@...aro.org>, Borislav Petkov <bp@...en8.de>,
Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>, "H . Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>,
x86@...nel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH RFC v5 0/5] Introduce the STACKLEAK feature and a test for
it
Hello Peter and Mark,
On 23.10.2017 12:08, Mark Rutland wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 22, 2017 at 03:11:57PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
>> On Sun, Oct 22, 2017 at 03:22:48AM +0300, Alexander Popov wrote:
>>> Further work
>>> =============
>>>
>>> - Rewrite erase_kstack() in C (if Ingo Molnar insists).
>>
>> Aside from legacy, is there any sane reason that stuff is in ASM? That
>> is, I too will insist it being in C unless you can provide good
>> arguments on why it needs be asm. All it does is memzero() right? And I
>> would think architectures already have fairly optimized implementations
>> of that around.
I added very detailed comments describing erase_kstack() on x86_64. It is quite
tricky for being fast.
It starts from the lowest_stack address and goes down to the bottom of the stack
searching for the poison value (-0xBEEF). If it reaches the stack bottom or
finds 17 poison values in a row, it starts to fill the memory between the
current position and the stack pointer with a poison value. Finally it resets
the lowest_stack value. So only used part of the kernel stack is actually erased.
I really like the PaX Team's code in erase_kstack().
> One argument for this being in asm is that you can't control the stack
> usage of a C implementation of erase_kstack(), which leaves a (small)
> portion of the stack potentially not cleared depending on what exactly
> the compiler does with the stack.
>
> If it's just a call to memzero(), the asm should be very simple, and I'd
> think it's better to err on the side of clearing as much of the stack as
> possible.
Laura Abbott wrote about her issues with erase_kstack() and gcc in the previous
thread: http://www.openwall.com/lists/kernel-hardening/2017/10/10/3
Anyway, I'll obey the final decision.
Best regards,
Alexander
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