Re: [PATCH v15 00/17] arm64: untag user pointers passed to the kernel

Kees Cook
2019-05-23T21:31:22Z

On Thu, May 23, 2019 at 06:43:46PM +0100, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> On Thu, May 23, 2019 at 09:38:19AM -0700, Kees Cook wrote:
> > What on this front would you be comfortable with? Given it's a new
> > feature isn't it sufficient to have a CONFIG (and/or boot option)?
>
> I'd rather avoid re-building kernels. A boot option would do, unless we
> see value in a per-process (inherited) personality or prctl. The

I think I've convinced myself that the normal<->TBI ABI control should
be a boot parameter. More below...

> > What about testing tools that intentionally insert high bits for syscalls
> > and are _expecting_ them to fail? It seems the TBI series will break them?
> > In that case, do we need to opt into TBI as well?
>
> If there are such tools, then we may need a per-process control. It's
> basically an ABI change.

syzkaller already attempts to randomly inject non-canonical and
0xFFFF....FFFF addresses for user pointers in syscalls in an effort to
find bugs like CVE-2017-5123 where waitid() via unchecked put_user() was
able to write directly to kernel memory[1].

It seems that using TBI by default and not allowing a switch back to
"normal" ABI without a reboot actually means that userspace cannot inject
kernel pointers into syscalls any more, since they'll get universally
stripped now. Is my understanding correct, here? i.e. exploiting
CVE-2017-5123 would be impossible under TBI?

If so, then I think we should commit to the TBI ABI and have a boot
flag to disable it, but NOT have a process flag, as that would allow
attackers to bypass the masking. The only flag should be "TBI or MTE".

If so, can I get top byte masking for other architectures too? Like,
just to strip high bits off userspace addresses? ;)

(Oh, in looking I see this is implemented with sign-extension... why
not just a mask? So it'll either be valid userspace address or forced
into the non-canonical range?)

[1] https://salls.github.io/Linux-Kernel-CVE-2017-5123/

> > Alright, the tl;dr appears to be:
> > - you want more assurances that we can find __user stripping in the
> > kernel more easily. (But this seems like a parallel problem.)
>
> Yes, and that we found all (most) cases now. The reason I don't see it
> as a parallel problem is that, as maintainer, I promise an ABI to user
> and I'd rather stick to it. I don't want, for example, ncurses to stop
> working because of some ioctl() rejecting tagged pointers.

But this is what I don't understand: it would need to be ncurses _using
TBI_, that would stop working (having started to work before, but then
regress due to a newly added one-off bug). Regular ncurses will be fine
because it's not using TBI. So The Golden Rule isn't violated, and by
definition, it's a specific regression caused by some bug (since TBI
would have had to have worked _before_ in the situation to be considered
a regression now). Which describes the normal path for kernel
development... add feature, find corner cases where it doesn't work,
fix them, encounter new regressions, fix those, repeat forever.

> If it's just the occasional one-off bug I'm fine to deal with it. But
> no-one convinced me yet that this is the case.

You believe there still to be some systemic cases that haven't been
found yet? And even if so -- isn't it better to work on that
incrementally?

> As for the generic driver code (filesystems or other subsystems),
> without some clear direction for developers, together with static
> checking/sparse, on how user pointers are cast to longs (one example),
> it would become my responsibility to identify and fix them up with any
> kernel release. This series is not providing such guidance, just adding
> untagged_addr() in some places that we think matter.

What about adding a nice bit of .rst documentation that describes the
situation and shows how to use untagged_addr(). This is the kind of
kernel-wide change that "everyone" needs to know about, and shouldn't
be the arch maintainer's sole responsibility to fix.

> > - we might need to opt in to TBI with a prctl()
>
> Yes, although still up for discussion.

I think I've talked myself out of it. I say boot param only! :)

So what do you say to these next steps:

- change untagged_addr() to use a static branch that is controlled with
a boot parameter.
- add, say, Documentation/core-api/user-addresses.rst to describe
proper care and handling of user space pointers with untagged_addr(),
with examples based on all the cases seen so far in this series.
- continue work to improve static analysis.

Thanks for wading through this with me! :)

--
Kees Cook