From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1752875AbcAMA2T (ORCPT ); Tue, 12 Jan 2016 19:28:19 -0500 Received: from mother.openwall.net ([195.42.179.200]:63145 "HELO mother.openwall.net" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with SMTP id S1751058AbcAMA2R (ORCPT ); Tue, 12 Jan 2016 19:28:17 -0500 X-Greylist: delayed 441 seconds by postgrey-1.27 at vger.kernel.org; Tue, 12 Jan 2016 19:28:17 EST Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2016 03:20:43 +0300 From: Solar Designer To: Daniel Axtens Cc: Jann Horn , kernel-hardening@lists.openwall.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Andrew Morton , HATAYAMA Daisuke , Vitaly Kuznetsov , Baoquan He , Masami Hiramatsu Subject: Re: [RFC] kernel/panic: place an upper limit on number of oopses Message-ID: <20160113002043.GA17146@openwall.com> References: <1452626745-31708-1-git-send-email-jann@thejh.net> <87mvsa5q40.fsf@gamma.ozlabs.ibm.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <87mvsa5q40.fsf@gamma.ozlabs.ibm.com> User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.2.3i Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Jann Horn wrote: > To prevent an attacker from turning a mostly harmless oops into an > exploitable issue using a refcounter wraparound caused by repeated > oopsing, limit the number of oopses. This may also reduce the likelihood of successful exploitation of some other vulnerabilities involving memory corruption, where an unsuccessful attempt may inadvertently trigger an Oops. The attacker would then need to succeed in fewer than the maximum allowed number of Oops'es. Jann's currently proposed default of 0x100000 is too high to make a difference in that respect, but people may set it differently. On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 10:34:39AM +1100, Daniel Axtens wrote: > I'm torn between making the limit configurable and not adding to the > massive proliferation of config options. What about reusing panic_on_oops for the configurable limit? The currently supported values of 0 and 1 would retain their meaning, 2 would panic after 2nd Oops, and so on. There's overlap with grsecurity's banning of users on Oops, but I think it makes sense to have both the trivial change proposed by Jann (perhaps with the reuse of panic_on_oops for configuration) and grsecurity-style banning (maybe with a low configurable limit, rather than always on first Oops). Alexander