Re: [PATCH RFC] seccomp: Implement syscall isolation based on memory areas

Andy Lutomirski
2020-06-01T23:18:43Z

On Mon, Jun 1, 2020 at 1:08 PM Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org> wrote:
>
> On Sun, May 31, 2020 at 02:03:48PM -0700, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> > On Sun, May 31, 2020 at 11:57 AM Andy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org> wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > > What if there was a special filter type that ran a BPF program on each
> > > syscall, and the program was allowed to access user memory to make its
> > > decisions, e.g. to look at some list of memory addresses. But this
> > > would explicitly *not* be a security feature -- execve() would remove
> > > the filter, and the filter's outcome would be one of redirecting
> > > execution or allowing the syscall. If the "allow" outcome occurs,
> > > then regular seccomp filters run. Obviously the exact semantics here
> > > would need some care.
> >
> > Let me try to flesh this out a little.
> >
> > A task could install a syscall emulation filter (maybe using the
> > seccomp() syscall, maybe using something else). There would be at
> > most one such filter per process. Upon doing a syscall, the kernel
> > will first do initial syscall fixups (e.g. SYSENTER/SYSCALL32 magic
> > argument translation) and would then invoke the filter. The filter is
> > an eBPF program (sorry Kees) and, as input, it gets access to the
>
> FWIW, I agree: something like this needs to use eBPF -- this isn't
> being designed as a security boundary. It's more like eBPF ptrace.

On a bit more consideration, I think that I have the model a bit
wrong. We shouldn't think of this as a *syscall* filter but as a
filter for architectural privilege transitions in general. After all,
there is no particular guarantee that any given emulated program has a
syscall ABI that is even remotely compatible with Linux. So maybe the
filter is fed events like SYSCALL64, SYSCALL32, SYSENTER, #GP, #PF
(the bad kind that would otherwise get a signal), #UD, etc. And the
filter can examine process state and take some reasonable action.
Think if it as a personality scheme that's programmable by user code.
I imagine that even schemes like NaCl could make some use of this.

This allows all kinds of interesting things. For example, it should
give Wine a much nicer emulation of Windows SEH and vectored signals.
And maybe it could finally allow Linux userspace to have some sensible
equivalent of those Windows features -- being able to write library
code that could sanely handle, say, math errors would be quite handy.

This could be mocked up with cBPF, but I think a cBPF version will
struggle to be a performant solution for Wine because it will have a
hard time distinguishing between Windows and Linux syscalls.

--Andy