Re: [git pull] uaccess-related bits of vfs.git

Al Viro
2017-05-13T20:37:07Z

On Sat, May 13, 2017 at 12:00:10PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
> Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2015 10:42:18 -0700
> >
> > So I'd suggest we should just do a wholesale replacement of
> > __copy_to/from_user() with the non-underlined cases. Then, we could
> > switch insividual ones back - with reasoning of why they matter, and
> > with pointers to how it does access_ok() two lines before.
> >
> > We should probably even consider looking at __get_user/__put_user().
> > Few of them are actually performance-critical.
>
> Look at that date. It's over two years ago. In the intervening two
> years, how many of those conversions have happened?

Speaking of killing that kind of crap off: there was a question left from the
last cycle that hadn't been sorted out.

SCTP does this in a couple of places:
/* Check the user passed a healthy pointer. */
if (unlikely(!access_ok(VERIFY_READ, addrs, addrs_size)))
return -EFAULT;

/* Alloc space for the address array in kernel memory. */
kaddrs = kmalloc(addrs_size, GFP_USER | __GFP_NOWARN);
if (unlikely(!kaddrs))
return -ENOMEM;

if (__copy_from_user(kaddrs, addrs, addrs_size)) {
kfree(kaddrs);
return -EFAULT;
}
instead of memdup_user(). Part of the rationale is pretty weak (access_ok()
as sanity check to prevent user-triggerable attempts to allocate too much -
it still can trivially trigger 2G, so it's not worth much), part is more
interesting. Namely, that whining into the syslog shouldn't be that easy
to trigger.

That's a valid point and it might apply to memdup_user() callers out there.
Potential variants:
* add an explicit upper bound on the size and turn that into
memdup_user() (and check that all memdup_user() callers are bounded).
* have memdup_user() itself pass __GFP_NOWARN.
* add kvmemdup_user() that would use kvmalloc() (with its callers
expected to use kvfree()); see who else might benefit from conversion.

Preferences?