[kernel-hardening] Re: [RFC][PATCH 0/7] Sanitization of slabs based on grsecurity/PaX

Laura Abbott
2016-01-14T03:49:53Z

On 1/8/16 6:07 AM, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> On Thu, 7 Jan 2016, Laura Abbott wrote:
>
>> The slub_debug=P not only poisons it enables other consistency checks on the
>> slab as well, assuming my understanding of what check_object does is correct.
>> My hope was to have the poison part only and none of the consistency checks in
>> an attempt to mitigate performance issues. I misunderstood when the checks
>> actually run and how SLUB_DEBUG was used.
>
> Ok I see that there pointer check is done without checking the
> corresponding debug flag. Patch attached thar fixes it.
>
>> Another option would be to have a flag like SLAB_NO_SANITY_CHECK.
>> sanitization enablement would just be that and SLAB_POISON
>> in the debug options. The disadvantage to this approach would be losing
>> the sanitization for ->ctor caches (the grsecurity version works around this
>> by re-initializing with ->ctor, I haven't heard any feedback if this actually
>> acceptable) and not having some of the fast paths enabled
>> (assuming I'm understanding the code path correctly.) which would also
>> be a performance penalty
>
> I think we simply need to fix the missing check there. There is already a
> flag SLAB_DEBUG_FREE for the pointer checks.
>
>

The patch improves performance but the overall performance of these full
sanitization patches is still significantly better than slub_debug=P. I'll
put some effort into seeing if I can figure out where the slow down is
coming from.

Thanks,
Laura

>
> Subject: slub: Only perform pointer checks in check_object when SLAB_DEBUG_FREE is set
>
> Seems that check_object() always checks for pointer issues currently.
>
> Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>
>
> Index: linux/mm/slub.c
> ===================================================================
> --- linux.orig/mm/slub.c
> +++ linux/mm/slub.c
> @@ -848,6 +848,9 @@ static int check_object(struct kmem_cach
> */
> return 1;
>
> + if (!(s->flags & SLAB_DEBUG_FREE))
> + return 1;
> +
> /* Check free pointer validity */
> if (!check_valid_pointer(s, page, get_freepointer(s, p))) {
> object_err(s, page, p, "Freepointer corrupt");
>