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

Kees Cook
2017-05-12T21:00:10Z

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.

-Kees

--
Kees Cook
Pixel Security