Re: [RESEND PATCH v4 8/8] arm64: Allow 64-bit tasks to invoke compat syscalls

Amanieu d'Antras
2021-05-19T16:15:16Z

On Wed, May 19, 2021 at 4:30 PM Steven Price <steven.price@arm.com> wrote:
> Perhaps I'm missing something, but surely some syscalls that would be
> native on 32 bit will have to be translated by Tango to 64 bit syscalls
> to do the right thing? E.g. from the previous patch compat sigreturn
> isn't available.

That's correct.

Tango handles syscalls in 3 different ways:
- ~20 syscalls are completely emulated in userspace or through 64-bit
syscalls. E.g. sigaction, sigreturn, clone, exit.
- Another ~50 syscalls have various forms of pre/post-processing, but
are otherwise passed on to the kernel compat syscall handler. E.g.
open, mmap, ptrace.
- The remaining syscalls are passed on to the kernel compat syscall
handler directly.

The first group of ~20 syscalls will effectively bypass the
user-specified seccomp filter: any 64-bit syscalls used to emulate
them will be whitelisted. I consider this an acceptable limitation to
Tango's seccomp support since I see no viable way of supporting
seccomp filtering for these syscalls.

> In those cases to correctly emulate seccomp, isn't Tango is going to
> have to implement the seccomp filter in user space?

I have not implemented user-mode seccomp emulation because it can
trivially be bypassed by spawning a 64-bit child process which runs
outside Tango. Even when spawning another translated process, the
user-mode filter will not be preserved across an execve.

> I guess the question comes down to how big a hole is
> syscall_in_tango_whitelist() - if Tango only requires a small set of
> syscalls then there is still some security benefit, but otherwise this
> doesn't seem like a particularly big benefit considering you're already
> going to need the BPF infrastructure in user space.

Currently Tango only whitelists ~50 syscalls, which is small enough to
provide security benefits and definitely better than not supporting
seccomp at all.