Re: [PATCH 0/6] Memory Mapping (VMA) protection using PKU - set 1

Jeff Xu
2023-05-17T15:22:10Z

On Wed, May 17, 2023 at 8:07 AM Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com> wrote:
>
> On 5/17/23 03:51, Stephen Röttger wrote:
> > On Wed, May 17, 2023 at 12:41 AM Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com> wrote:
> >> Can't run arbitrary instructions, but can make (pretty) arbitrary syscalls?
> >
> > The threat model is that the attacker has arbitrary read/write, while other
> > threads run in parallel. So whenever a regular thread performs a syscall and
> > takes a syscall argument from memory, we assume that argument can be attacker
> > controlled.
> > Unfortunately, the line is a bit blurry which syscalls / syscall arguments we
> > need to assume to be attacker controlled.
>
> Ahh, OK. So, it's not that the *attacker* can make arbitrary syscalls.
> It's that the attacker might leverage its arbitrary write to trick a
> victim thread into turning what would otherwise be a good syscall into a
> bad one with attacker-controlled content.
>
> I guess that makes the readv/writev-style of things a bad idea in this
> environment.
>
> >>> Sigreturn is a separate problem that we hope to solve by adding pkey
> >>> support to sigaltstack
> >>
> >> What kind of support were you planning to add?
> >
> > We’d like to allow registering pkey-tagged memory as a sigaltstack. This would
> > allow the signal handler to run isolated from other threads. Right now, the
> > main reason this doesn’t work is that the kernel would need to change the pkru
> > state before storing the register state on the stack.
> >
> >> I was thinking that an attacker with arbitrary write access would wait
> >> until PKRU was on the userspace stack and *JUST* before the kernel
> >> sigreturn code restores it to write a malicious value. It could
> >> presumably do this with some asynchronous mechanism so that even if
> >> there was only one attacker thread, it could change its own value.
> >
> > I’m not sure I follow the details, can you give an example of an asynchronous
> > mechanism to do this? E.g. would this be the kernel writing to the memory in a
> > syscall for example?
>
> I was thinking of all of the IORING_OP_*'s that can write to memory or
> aio(7).

IORING is challenging from security perspectives, for now, it is
disabled in ChromeOS.
Though I'm not sure how aio is related ?

Thanks
-Jeff