Re: [PATCH RFC 2/4] mm, personality: Implement memory-deny-write-execute as a personality flag

David Hildenbrand
2022-04-21T17:37:57Z

On 13.04.22 15:49, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> The aim of such policy is to prevent a user task from inadvertently
> creating an executable mapping that is or was writeable (and
> subsequently made read-only).
>
> An example of mmap() returning -EACCESS if the policy is enabled:
>
> mmap(0, size, PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE | PROT_EXEC, flags, 0, 0);
>
> Similarly, mprotect() would return -EACCESS below:
>
> addr = mmap(0, size, PROT_READ | PROT_EXEC, flags, 0, 0);
> mprotect(addr, size, PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE | PROT_EXEC);
>
> With the past vma writeable permission tracking, mprotect() below would
> also fail with -EACCESS:
>
> addr = mmap(0, size, PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE, flags, 0, 0);
> mprotect(addr, size, PROT_READ | PROT_EXEC);
>
> While the above could be achieved by checking PROT_WRITE & PROT_EXEC on
> mmap/mprotect and denying mprotect(PROT_EXEC) altogether (current
> systemd MDWE approach via SECCOMP BPF filters), we want the following
> scenario to succeed:
>
> addr = mmap(0, size, PROT_READ | PROT_EXEC, flags, 0, 0);
> mprotect(addr, size, PROT_READ | PROT_EXEC | PROT_BTI);
>
> where PROT_BTI enables branch tracking identification on arm64.
>
> The choice for a DENY_WRITE_EXEC personality flag, inherited on fork()
> and execve(), was made by analogy to READ_IMPLIES_EXEC.
>
> Note that it is sufficient to check for VM_WAS_WRITE in
> map_deny_write_exec() as this flag is always set on VM_WRITE mappings.
>
> Signed-off-by: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>
> Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
> Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>

How does this interact with get_user_pages(FOLL_WRITE|FOLL_FORCE) on a
VMA that is VM_MAYWRITE but not VM_WRITE? Is it handled accordingly?

Note that in the (FOLL_WRITE|FOLL_FORCE) we only require VM_MAYWRITE on
the vma and trigger a write fault. As the VMA is not VM_WRITE, we won't
actually map the PTE writable, but set it dirty. GUP will retry, find a
R/O pte that is dirty and where it knows that it broke COW and will
allow the read access, although the PTE is R/O.

That mechanism is required to e.g., set breakpoints in R/O MAP_PRIVATE
kernel sections, but it's used elsewhere for page pinning as well.

My gut feeling is that GUP(FOLL_WRITE|FOLL_FORCE) could be used right
now to bypass that mechanism, I might be wrong.

--
Thanks,

David / dhildenb