Re: [kernel-hardening] Re: [PATCH v9 1/4] syscalls: Verify address limit before returning to user-mode

Kees Cook
2017-05-12T21:04:49Z

On Fri, May 12, 2017 at 2:00 PM, Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org> wrote:
> On Fri, May 12, 2017 at 1:45 PM, Russell King - ARM Linux
> <linux@armlinux.org.uk> wrote:
>> On Fri, May 12, 2017 at 10:30:44PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
>>> On Fri, May 12, 2017 at 09:21:06PM +0100, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
>>> > On Fri, May 12, 2017 at 12:30:02PM -0700, Kees Cook wrote:
>>> > > I'm clearly not explaining things well enough. I shouldn't say
>>> > > "corruption", I should say "malicious manipulation". The methodology
>>> > > of attacks against the stack are quite different from the other kinds
>>> > > of attacks like use-after-free, heap overflow, etc. Being able to
>>> > > exhaust the kernel stack (either due to deep recursion or unbounded
>>> > > alloca())
>>> >
>>> > I really hope we don't have alloca() use in the kernel. Do you have
>>> > evidence to support that assertion?
>>> >
>>> > IMHO alloca() (or similar) should not be present in any kernel code
>>> > because we have a limited stack - we have kmalloc() etc for that kind
>>> > of thing.
>>>
>>> On stack variable length arrays get implemented by the compiler doing
>>> alloca(), and we sadly have a few of those around.
>>
>> I hope their size is appropriately limited, but something tells me it
>> would be foolish to assume that.
>>
>>> But yes, fully agreed on the desirability of alloca() and things.
>>
>> Hmm, I wonder if -fno-builtin-alloca would prevent those... it looks
>> like it certainly would prevent an explicit alloca() call.
>
> Building with -Werror=vla is exciting. :)
>
> A lot of it is in crypto (which are relatively static sizes, just
> using function callbacks), but there is plenty more.

I meant to also paste an example (which is harmless, I haven't looked
extensively at other examples):

unsigned long alignmask = crypto_tfm_alg_alignmask(tfm);
unsigned int size = crypto_tfm_alg_blocksize(tfm);
u8 buffer[size + alignmask];

Looking at all the places (and having tried to remove a few of these
in pstore), I think it might be quite frustrating to eliminate them
all and then declare VLAs dead. I'm not against trying, though. :)

-Kees

--
Kees Cook
Pixel Security