Re: [PATCH 16/18] net: mpls: prevent bounds-check bypass via speculative execution

Linus Torvalds
2018-01-10T03:28:03Z

On Tue, Jan 9, 2018 at 4:48 PM, Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com> wrote:
>
> I looks like there is another problem, or I'm misreading the
> cleverness.

I think you were misreading it.

I was basically saying that this:

unsigned long _mask = ~(long)(_m - 1 - _i) >> BITS_PER_LONG - 1;\

doesn't work, and that the "_m -1 - _i" needs to be replaced by "_i |
_m -1 -_i".

So you have

unsigned long _mask = ~(long)(_i (_m - 1 - _i)) >> BITS_PER_LONG - 1;\

which should give the right result. No?

But as mentioned, I think you can do it with two instructions if you
do an architecture-specific inline asm:

unsigned long mask;

asm("cmpq %1,%2; sbbq %0,%0"
:"=r" (mask)
:"g" (max),"r" (idx));

which is likely much faster, and has much better register usage ("max"
can be a constant or loaded directly from memory, and "mask" could be
assigned the same register as idx).

But once again, I didn't really test it.

Note that the "cmpq/sbbq" version works regardless of max/idx values,
since it literally does the math in BITS_ION_LONG+1 bits.

In contrast, the "binary or with idx" version only works if the high
bit set in idx cannot be valid (put another way: 'max' must not be
bigger than MAXLONG+1).

Linus