Re: [PATCH v2 seccomp 3/6] seccomp/cache: Add "emulator" to check if filter is arg-dependent

Kees Cook
2020-09-25T19:42:45Z

On Fri, Sep 25, 2020 at 11:45:05AM -0500, YiFei Zhu wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 24, 2020 at 10:04 PM YiFei Zhu <zhuyifei1999@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Why do the prepare here instead of during attach? (And note that it
> > > should not be written to fail.)
> >
> > Right.
>
> During attach a spinlock (current->sighand->siglock) is held. Do we
> really want to put the emulator in the "atomic section"?

It's a good point, but I had some other ideas around it that lead to me
a different conclusion. Here's what I've got in my head:

I don't view filter attach (nor the siglock) as fastpath: the lock is
rarely contested and the "long time" will only be during filter attach.

When performing filter emulation, all the syscalls that are already
marked as "must run filter" on the previous filter can be skipped for
the new filter, since it cannot change the outcome, which makes the
emulation step faster.

The previous filter's bitmap isn't "stable" until siglock is held.

If we do the emulation step before siglock, we have to always do full
evaluation of all syscalls, and then merge the bitmap during attach.
That means all filters ever attached will take maximal time to perform
emulation.

I prefer the idea of the emulation step taking advantage of the bitmap
optimization, since the kernel spends less time doing work over the life
of the process tree. It's certainly marginal, but it also lets all the
bitmap manipulation stay in one place (as opposed to being split between
"prepare" and "attach").

What do you think?

--
Kees Cook