Re: [kernel-hardening] [PATCH 09/38] usercopy: Mark kmalloc caches as usercopy caches

Vlastimil Babka
2020-04-07T08:00:33Z

On 1/31/20 1:03 PM, Jann Horn wrote:

> I think dma-kmalloc slabs should be handled the same way as normal
> kmalloc slabs. When a dma-kmalloc allocation is freshly created, it is
> just normal kernel memory - even if it might later be used for DMA -,
> and it should be perfectly fine to copy_from_user() into such
> allocations at that point, and to copy_to_user() out of them at the
> end. If you look at the places where such allocations are created, you
> can see things like kmemdup(), memcpy() and so on - all normal
> operations that shouldn't conceptually be different from usercopy in
> any relevant way.

So, let's do that?

----8<----
From d5190e4e871689a530da3c3fd327be45a88f006a Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 2020 09:58:00 +0200
Subject: [PATCH] usercopy: Mark dma-kmalloc caches as usercopy caches

We have seen a "usercopy: Kernel memory overwrite attempt detected to SLUB
object 'dma-kmalloc-1 k' (offset 0, size 11)!" error on s390x, as IUCV uses
kmalloc() with __GFP_DMA because of memory address restrictions.
The issue has been discussed [2] and it has been noted that if all the kmalloc
caches are marked as usercopy, there's little reason not to mark dma-kmalloc
caches too. The 'dma' part merely means that __GFP_DMA is used to restrict
memory address range.

As Jann Horn put it [3]:

"I think dma-kmalloc slabs should be handled the same way as normal
kmalloc slabs. When a dma-kmalloc allocation is freshly created, it is
just normal kernel memory - even if it might later be used for DMA -,
and it should be perfectly fine to copy_from_user() into such
allocations at that point, and to copy_to_user() out of them at the
end. If you look at the places where such allocations are created, you
can see things like kmemdup(), memcpy() and so on - all normal
operations that shouldn't conceptually be different from usercopy in
any relevant way."

Thus this patch marks the dma-kmalloc-* caches as usercopy.

[1] https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1156053
[2] https://lore.kernel.org/kernel-hardening/bfca96db-bbd0-d958-7732-76e36c667c68@suse.cz/
[3] https://lore.kernel.org/kernel-hardening/CAG48ez1a4waGk9kB0WLaSbs4muSoK0AYAVk8=XYaKj4_+6e6Hg@mail.gmail.com/

Signed-off-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
---
mm/slab_common.c | 3 ++-
1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/mm/slab_common.c b/mm/slab_common.c
index 5282f881d2f5..ae9486160594 100644
--- a/mm/slab_common.c
+++ b/mm/slab_common.c
@@ -1303,7 +1303,8 @@ void __init create_kmalloc_caches(slab_flags_t flags)
kmalloc_caches[KMALLOC_DMA][i] = create_kmalloc_cache(
kmalloc_info[i].name[KMALLOC_DMA],
kmalloc_info[i].size,
- SLAB_CACHE_DMA | flags, 0, 0);
+ SLAB_CACHE_DMA | flags, 0,
+ kmalloc_info[i].size);
}
}
#endif
--
2.26.0