Re: [PATCH v7 00/11] add support for Clang's Shadow Call Stack

James Morse
2020-02-11T13:57:46Z

Hi Sami,

On 28/01/2020 18:49, Sami Tolvanen wrote:
> This patch series adds support for Clang's Shadow Call Stack
> (SCS) mitigation, which uses a separately allocated shadow stack
> to protect against return address overwrites. More information
> can be found here:
>
> https://clang.llvm.org/docs/ShadowCallStack.html
>
> SCS provides better protection against traditional buffer
> overflows than CONFIG_STACKPROTECTOR_*, but it should be noted
> that SCS security guarantees in the kernel differ from the ones
> documented for user space. The kernel must store addresses of
> shadow stacks used by inactive tasks and interrupt handlers in
> memory, which means an attacker capable reading and writing
> arbitrary memory may be able to locate them and hijack control
> flow by modifying shadow stacks that are not currently in use.
>
> SCS is currently supported only on arm64, where the compiler
> requires the x18 register to be reserved for holding the current
> task's shadow stack pointer.

I found I had to add:
| KBUILD_CFLAGS := $(filter-out -ffixed-x18 $(CC_FLAGS_SCS), $(KBUILD_CFLAGS))

to drivers/firmware/efi/libstub/Makefile, to get this going.
I don't think there is much point supporting SCS for the EFIstub, its already isolated
from the rest of the kernel's C code by the __efistub symbol prefix machinery, and trying
to use it would expose us to buggy firmware at a point we can't handle it!

I can send a patch if its easier for you,

Thanks,

James