Re: [RFC][PATCH 0/6] x86: Kernel IBT beginnings

Peter Zijlstra
2021-11-23T09:03:16Z

On Mon, Nov 22, 2021 at 11:58:43PM -0800, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> What is "IBT"?

Fair enough; it's Indirect Branch Tracking, it's a hardware feature that
ensures any indirect JMP/CALL can only ever land on an ENDBR
instruction. It's a form of Control Flow Integrity, albeit a weak one.
(FineIBT is a software improvement that combines this with a hash value
to further narrow the allowed branches. People are working on that, but
basics first etc..)

More practical, by stripping ENDBR instruction from functions that are
never called indirectly, we insta kill the tried and true method of:

func = kallsym_lookup_name("unexported_function");
(*func)(args);

favoured by pretty much every out of tree piece-of-cra^Wmodule.