Re: [PATCH v2 2/6] ubsan: Reintroduce signed and unsigned overflow sanitizers

Kees Cook
2024-02-02T12:17:04Z

On Fri, Feb 02, 2024 at 12:01:55PM +0100, Marco Elver wrote:
> On Fri, 2 Feb 2024 at 11:16, Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org> wrote:
> > [...]
> > +config UBSAN_UNSIGNED_WRAP
> > + bool "Perform checking for unsigned arithmetic wrap-around"
> > + depends on $(cc-option,-fsanitize=unsigned-integer-overflow)
> > + depends on !X86_32 # avoid excessive stack usage on x86-32/clang
> > + depends on !COMPILE_TEST
> > + help
> > + This option enables -fsanitize=unsigned-integer-overflow which checks
> > + for wrap-around of any arithmetic operations with unsigned integers. This
> > + currently causes x86 to fail to boot.
>
> My hypothesis is that these options will quickly be enabled by various
> test and fuzzing setups, to the detriment of kernel developers. While
> the commit message states that these are for experimentation, I do not
> think it is at all clear from the Kconfig options.

I can certainly rephrase it more strongly. I would hope that anyone
enabling the unsigned sanitizer would quickly realize how extremely
noisy it is.

> Unsigned integer wrap-around is relatively common (it is _not_ UB
> after all). While I can appreciate that in some cases wrap around is a
> genuine semantic bug, and that's what we want to find with these
> changes, ultimately marking all semantically valid wrap arounds to
> catch the unmarked ones. Given these patterns are so common, and C
> programmers are used to them, it will take a lot of effort to mark all
> the intentional cases. But I fear that even if we get to that place,
> _unmarked_ but semantically valid unsigned wrap around will keep
> popping up again and again.

I agree -- it's going to be quite a challenge. My short-term goal is to
see how far the sanitizer itself can get with identifying intentional
uses. For example, I found two more extremely common code patterns that
trip it now:

unsigned int i = ...;
...
while (i--) { ... }

This trips the sanitizer at loop exit. :P It seems like churn to
refactor all of these into "for (; i; i--)". The compiler should be able
to identify this by looking for later uses of "i", etc.

The other is negative constants: -1UL, -3ULL, etc. These are all over
the place and very very obviously intentional and should be ignored by
the compiler.

> What is the long-term vision to minimize the additional churn this may
> introduce?

My hope is that we can evolve the coverage over time. Solving it all at
once won't be possible, but I think we can get pretty far with the
signed overflow sanitizer, which runs relatively cleanly already.

If we can't make meaningful progress in unsigned annotations, I think
we'll have to work on gaining type-based operator overloading so we can
grow type-aware arithmetic. That will serve as a much cleaner
annotation. E.g. introduce jiffie_t, which wraps.

> I think the problem reminds me a little of the data race problem,
> although I suspect unsigned integer wraparound is much more common
> than data races (which unlike unsigned wrap around is actually UB) -
> so chasing all intentional unsigned integer wrap arounds and marking
> will take even more effort than marking all intentional data races
> (which we're still slowly, but steadily, making progress towards).
>
> At the very least, these options should 'depends on EXPERT' or even
> 'depends on BROKEN' while the story is still being worked out.

Perhaps I should hold off on bringing the unsigned sanitizer back? I was
hoping to work in parallel with the signed sanitizer, but maybe this
isn't the right approach?

--
Kees Cook