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Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2011 06:13:24 +0400
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: oss-security@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: glibc crypt(3), crypt_r(3), PHP crypt() may use alloca()
Hi,
Here's a subtle issue for discussion. I am not sure whether and how to
deal with this one in glibc and PHP (and in other "affected libraries");
it is more obvious how to deal with it in applications, but not all will.
I actually share some responsibility for this one. In 2000, I reported
that glibc's md5-crypt code would sometimes perform unaligned accesses -
I actually observed this in normal usage on an Alpha. Ulrich promptly
fixed the code, and I was happy. I even pointed out some minor issues
to fix in the initial fix, which were also fixed. What I overlooked,
though, was the potential security impact of the uses of alloca()
introduced by Ulrich's fix. Here's the original ChangeLog entry:
2000-07-04 Ulrich Drepper <drepper@...hat.com>
[...]
* crypt/md5-crypt.c (__md5_crypt_r): If buffers for key and salt
are not aligned to alignof(md5_uint32) do it before calling
__md5_process_bytes.
* crypt/md5.c: Make sure buffers are aligned.
* crypt/md5.h: Likewise.
Reported by Solar Designer <solar@...se.com>.
The patch with some later fixes (August 2000) may be found here:
http://cvsweb.openwall.com/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/~checkout~/Owl/packages/glibc/Attic/glibc-2.1.3-cvs-20000824-md5-align-clean.diff?rev=1.1
It introduced two uses of alloca() - on key and salt - but only in case
the original key and/or salt are not already aligned. In practice, I
think they just happen to be properly aligned in most builds of most
programs most of the time, so the code paths with alloca()s are not
taken. But in some programs/builds/invocations, they are.
This code is still in current glibc. And the newer SHA-crypt code (both
flavors of it) was based on it, including the two alloca()s and more:
$ fgrep alloca glibc-2.14.1/crypt/*
glibc-2.14.1/crypt/md5-crypt.c: char *tmp = (char *) alloca (key_len + __alignof__ (md5_uint32));
glibc-2.14.1/crypt/md5-crypt.c: char *tmp = (char *) alloca (salt_len + __alignof__ (md5_uint32));
glibc-2.14.1/crypt/sha256-crypt.c: char *tmp = (char *) alloca (key_len + __alignof__ (uint32_t));
glibc-2.14.1/crypt/sha256-crypt.c: char *tmp = (char *) alloca (salt_len + __alignof__ (uint32_t));
glibc-2.14.1/crypt/sha256-crypt.c: cp = p_bytes = alloca (key_len);
glibc-2.14.1/crypt/sha256-crypt.c: cp = s_bytes = alloca (salt_len);
glibc-2.14.1/crypt/sha512-crypt.c: char *tmp = (char *) alloca (key_len + __alignof__ (uint64_t));
glibc-2.14.1/crypt/sha512-crypt.c: char *tmp = (char *) alloca (salt_len + __alignof__ (uint64_t));
glibc-2.14.1/crypt/sha512-crypt.c: cp = p_bytes = alloca (key_len);
glibc-2.14.1/crypt/sha512-crypt.c: cp = s_bytes = alloca (salt_len);
The public domain SHA-crypt code also got into PHP 5.3.2+.
One problem with this is that programs that accept potentially really
long passwords (millions of characters), don't sanitize their length,
and pass them into crypt(3), crypt_r(3), or PHP's crypt() might have
portions of another thread's stack or the heap overwritten. For usual
Unix daemons and programs written in C this is unrealistic since they
typically use fixed-size buffers (and have to limit the password length,
or they'd have buffer overflow vulnerabilities). However, for programs
written in languages or with frameworks providing dynamically-allocated
strings (which may include some relatively modern C programs, starting
with qmail), this becomes quite realistic. Ideally, such programs should
sanitize the password length anyway (such as to avoid excessive CPU time
consumption on maliciously long passwords), but it is fairly likely that
they don't.
Another problem is that it could allow for bypassing of questionable
sandboxes, such as PHP's safe_mode. In this case, not only key, but
also salt is untrusted input.
More importantly, salt may be considered not fully trusted e.g. when a
web app processes user database records imported from elsewhere.
Now, chances are that dynamically allocated string buffers are properly
aligned such as due to use of malloc(). There might be exceptions,
but I am not aware of any specific ones. In fact, even though I
mentioned PHP's crypt() here, I did not verify whether it is possible
for a PHP script to have an unaligned address passed into PHP's included
SHA-crypt code or into the underlying system's crypt(3).
However, the two extra alloca()s seen in sha256-crypt.c and
sha512-crypt.c above appear to be invoked irrespective of alignment.
I did some testing against glibc's md5-crypt with a multi-threaded
program on Linux/x86_64, with 10 MB per-thread stacks. By playing with
password lengths of around 10 MB (slightly lower and higher than 10 MB)
in an unaligned buffer, I was able to get the malicious thread itself to
crash either on the callq instruction to memcpy() (because the stack
pointer did not point into a valid stack at the time) or inside
memcpy(). In the latter case, some portion of another thread's stack
was presumably overwritten before the malicious thread would crash.
I did not proceed to develop this further into a more convincing PoC.
As to fixing this, ideally several things need to happen:
1. Programs should sanitize password length. This should include web
apps written in PHP. This is desirable irrespective of the alloca()
risk or lack thereof. For example, Drupal 7 limits password length to
128 characters (not only in HTML, but also in PHP code, indeed) even
though it does not use crypt().
2. PHP itself should probably sanitize password length as well, although
it may use a much higher limit such that this limit is never hit when
the app has a length check too. To deal with the alloca() issue, 2048
bytes (half a page on x86) feels right.
Maybe PHP already got something like this since I did report the issue:
http://news.php.net/php.internals/54270
(I did not re-check the latest PHP before posting this, sorry.)
3. Maybe glibc and the SHA-crypt reference code should stop using
alloca() in favor of having the underlying MD5, SHA-256, and SHA-512
implementations accepting potentially unaligned buffers like e.g.
OpenSSL's implementations do. Unfortunately, this might have
performance impact. Thus, maybe alloca() should continue to be used
when the respective string is reasonably short (e.g., up to 2048 bytes),
and otherwise a fallback to the potentially slower implementation should
be made (avoiding the arbitrarily large copying). Unfortunately, this
may significantly complicate the code (there may have to be some code
duplication and/or more extensive use of cpp macros).
Alternatively, crypt(3) and crypt_r(3) (and the reference code for
SHA-crypt?) could refuse to work on overly long key or/and salt strings,
but then the question is what they should do on error. crypt(3)
returning NULL and setting errno is SUSv2-compliant, but in practice is
unexpected by many programs. Thus, I think the functions would need to
return a string that is guaranteed not to match the salt string, e.g.
with something like:
buffer[0] = '*';
buffer[1] = '0';
buffer[2] = '\0';
if (salt[0] == '*' && salt[1] == '0')
buffer[1] = '1';
(but also need to check buflen).
Finally, we could use malloc() instead of alloca(), but this doesn't
eliminate the need to potentially handle an error condition (what if
malloc() returns NULL?)
I'd appreciate any comments. This is not a CVE request, but rather a
request for discussion. I did not report this via glibc Bugzilla yet -
I feel that discussing it in here first is preferable.
Alexander
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