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Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2010 08:48:01 +0300
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: oss-security@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: Linux kernel proactive security hardening
Dan, Vasiliy -
On Mon, Nov 08, 2010 at 06:07:38AM +0300, Solar Designer wrote:
> On a more relevant issue (to us), any ideas on dealing with kernel stack
> infoleaks in a general manner (not just plugging the bugs one by one)?
> I guess it could be addressed in gcc (an option to wipe stack frames) or
> in the kernel (wipe even more of the stack, beyond the stack pointer, on
> syscall entry). Unfortunately, either has likely measurable performance
> impact. (BTW, has some of this been implemented somewhere already?)
> Any other ideas?
OK, here are some lower-overhead ideas of my own:
1. Perhaps the majority of infoleaks (maybe over 90% of those being
discovered these days?) are triggerable via only a handful of syscalls,
and perhaps only in certain easy-to-check-for circumstances. I am
thinking ioctl(2), as well as maybe read(2) (and other read syscalls,
yes...) from device files (not from other file types). I haven't
checked whether this matches the statistics so far or not - we need to
check and come up with a short list of typical "patterns" like this.
Then we may implement stack wiping (say, to 1 KB below the stack
pointer) invoked from top-level functions for these syscalls and only
when the circumstances are present (e.g., check file type for the
provided fd). Do it before calling the deeper layers, indeed.
2. We could turn all function-local non-static definitions of:
struct x y;
into:
struct x y = {};
We could do this by pre-processing the source files or with a patch to
gcc (introduce a command-line option to assume empty initializers for
all on-stack structs).
I've just checked - this often produces efficient code: where it is
obvious enough for gcc that most fields are explicitly initialized by
the function, then only the few actually uninitialized ones are zeroed.
Moreover, in cases where the struct or its fields are then copied to
other variables, the struct itself may get eliminated (and the
assignments/zeroing are made right to the target variables). Indeed,
copy_to_user() should prevent the latter optimization, but I am also
considering cases where the above change would happen to be applied to
structs never exported to userspace (if we apply it universally).
Unfortunately, there will be plenty of cases where gcc would not be able
to tell that the struct is not used until a certain point, so it'd have
to needlessly initialize it... which will result in performance impact.
Please note that either of the ideas above will take care both of
uninitialized fields and of alignment gaps. With the second approach
this was not obvious to me, so I tested (with gcc 3.4.5 only so far):
struct x {
int a;
char b;
int c;
};
void f(struct x *y) {
struct x x = {};
x.a = 1;
x.b = 2;
x.c = 3;
*y = x;
}
The produced code is inefficient, but safe - it zeroizes the entire
struct (12 bytes), then proceeds to set the three fields (4+1+4).
3. I also briefly thought of post-processing gcc-generated assembly
files, but I like the above approaches better.
Perhaps #1 above should be it (wipe the stack in _some_ cases only) -
simple and likely without measurable slowdown for real-world use.
#2 is more difficult and likely slower (albeit not as slow as wiping
entire stack frames would be). Maybe #2 will prevent a larger
percentage of vulnerabilities and in an easier to confirm way, though.
Comments and other ideas are welcome.
Alexander
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