Re: WMI and Kernel:User interface

Matthew Garrett
2017-06-19T22:28:18Z

On Tue, May 09, 2017 at 04:16:39PM -0700, Darren Hart wrote:

> To address this, I have proposed [3] that exporting WMI be opt-in, only done at
> the request of and in collaboration with a vendor, with the kernel platform
> driver given the opportunity to filter requests. This filtering would need to be
> at the method and argument inspection level, such as checking for specific bits
> in the input buffer, and rejecting the request if they conflict with an in
> kernel usage (that's worst case, in some cases just GUID or method ID could be
> sufficient).

WMI calls generally end up triggering system management mode, and SMM is
a mess of insecure code. People have been putting extensive effort into
avoiding mechanisms that allow root to escalate to higher privilege
levels - this is almost certainly the opposite of that. If the filtering
is sufficient to guarantee that no invalid input will ever hit the
firmware then that's not a problem, but that doesn't seem meaningfully
less complicated than just writing a proper driver in the first place.

As things stand, I think this is functionality that would have to be
disabled by the lockdown patchset, which means that it's functionality
that wouldn't exist for the majority of non-server platforms (and an
increasing number of server platforms).
--
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org