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Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2019 19:02:13 -0700
From: Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>
To: Alexander Potapenko <glider@...gle.com>
Cc: linux-security-module@...r.kernel.org, linux-mm@...ck.org,
ndesaulniers@...gle.com, kcc@...gle.com, dvyukov@...gle.com,
keescook@...omium.org, sspatil@...roid.com, labbott@...hat.com,
kernel-hardening@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH] mm: security: introduce CONFIG_INIT_HEAP_ALL
On Fri, 12 Apr 2019 14:45:01 +0200 Alexander Potapenko <glider@...gle.com> wrote:
> This config option adds the possibility to initialize newly allocated
> pages and heap objects with zeroes.
At what cost? Some performance test results would help this along.
> This is needed to prevent possible
> information leaks and make the control-flow bugs that depend on
> uninitialized values more deterministic.
>
> Initialization is done at allocation time at the places where checks for
> __GFP_ZERO are performed. We don't initialize slab caches with
> constructors or SLAB_TYPESAFE_BY_RCU to preserve their semantics.
>
> For kernel testing purposes filling allocations with a nonzero pattern
> would be more suitable, but may require platform-specific code. To have
> a simple baseline we've decided to start with zero-initialization.
>
> No performance optimizations are done at the moment to reduce double
> initialization of memory regions.
Requiring a kernel rebuild is rather user-hostile. A boot option
(early_param()) would be much more useful and I expect that the loss in
coverage would be small and acceptable? Could possibly use the
static_branch infrastructure.
> --- a/mm/slab.h
> +++ b/mm/slab.h
> @@ -167,6 +167,16 @@ static inline slab_flags_t kmem_cache_flags(unsigned int object_size,
> SLAB_TEMPORARY | \
> SLAB_ACCOUNT)
>
> +/*
> + * Do we need to initialize this allocation?
> + * Always true for __GFP_ZERO, CONFIG_INIT_HEAP_ALL enforces initialization
> + * of caches without constructors and RCU.
> + */
> +#define SLAB_WANT_INIT(cache, gfp_flags) \
> + ((GFP_INIT_ALWAYS_ON && !(cache)->ctor && \
> + !((cache)->flags & SLAB_TYPESAFE_BY_RCU)) || \
> + (gfp_flags & __GFP_ZERO))
Is there any reason why this *must* be implemented as a macro? If not,
it should be written in C please.
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