Re: [RFC PATCH 4/4] bpf: inhibit speculated out-of-bounds pointers

Mark Rutland
2018-01-04T11:00:07Z

On Thu, Jan 04, 2018 at 12:45:29AM +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 03, 2018 at 10:38:27PM +0000, Mark Rutland wrote:
> > Under speculation, CPUs may mis-predict branches in bounds checks. Thus,
> > memory accesses under a bounds check may be speculated even if the
> > bounds check fails, providing a primitive for building a side channel.
> >
> > The EBPF map code has a number of such bounds-checks accesses in
> > map_lookup_elem implementations. This patch modifies these to use the
> > nospec helpers to inhibit such side channels.
> >
> > The JITted lookup_elem implementations remain potentially vulnerable,
> > and are disabled (with JITted code falling back to the C
> > implementations).
>
> Since this is now public, let me re-iterate that I don't particularly
> like this approach. If you have to kill the JIT, could we please keep
> that in the arch JIT implementation?

Hopefully, killing the JIT is a temporary bodge. I agree that we want the arch
backends to JIT safe sequences somehow; I just haven't figured out exactly what
we need to do to make that happen.

Thanks,
Mark.