Re: [PATCH v7 22/27] binfmt_elf: Extract .note.gnu.property from an ELF file

Dave Martin
2019-06-18T16:20:15Z

On Tue, Jun 18, 2019 at 09:00:35AM -0700, Yu-cheng Yu wrote:
> On Tue, 2019-06-18 at 18:05 +0200, Florian Weimer wrote:
> > * Yu-cheng Yu:
> >
> > > > I assumed that it would also parse the main executable and make
> > > > adjustments based on that.
> > >
> > > Yes, Linux also looks at the main executable's header, but not its
> > > NT_GNU_PROPERTY_TYPE_0 if there is a loader.
> > >
> > > >
> > > > ld.so can certainly provide whatever the kernel needs. We need to tweak
> > > > the existing loader anyway.
> > > >
> > > > No valid statically-linked binaries exist today, so this is not a
> > > > consideration at this point.
> > >
> > > So from kernel, we look at only PT_GNU_PROPERTY?
> >
> > If you don't parse notes/segments in the executable for CET, then yes.
> > We can put PT_GNU_PROPERTY into the loader.
>
> Thanks!

Would this require the kernel and ld.so to be updated in a particular
order to avoid breakage? I don't know enough about RHEL to know how
controversial that might be.

Also:

What about static binaries distrubited as part of RHEL?

A user would also reasonably expect static binaries built using the
distro toolchain to work on top of the distro kernel... which might
be broken by this.

(When I say "broken" I mean that the binary would run, but CET
protections would be silently turned off.)

Cheers
---Dave