Re: [PATCH v11 25/25] x86/cet/shstk: Add arch_prctl functions for shadow stack

Dave Hansen
2020-09-10T02:26:29Z

On 9/9/20 4:25 PM, Yu, Yu-cheng wrote:
> On 9/9/2020 4:11 PM, Dave Hansen wrote:
>> On 9/9/20 4:07 PM, Yu, Yu-cheng wrote:
>>> What if a writable mapping is passed to madvise(MADV_SHSTK)?  Should
>>> that be rejected?
>>
>> It doesn't matter to me.  Even if it's readable, it _stops_ being even
>> directly readable after it's a shadow stack, right?  I don't think
>> writes are special in any way.  If anything, we *want* it to be writable
>> because that indicates that it can be written to, and we will want to
>> write to it soon.
>>
> But in a PROT_WRITE mapping, all the pte's have _PAGE_BIT_RW set.  To
> change them to shadow stack, we need to clear that bit from the pte's.
> That will be like mprotect_fixup()/change_protection_range().

The page table hardware bits don't matter. The user-visible protection
effects matter.

For instance, we have PROT_EXEC, which *CLEARS* a hardware NX PTE bit.
The PROT_ permissions are independent of the hardware.

I don't think the interface should be influenced at *all* by what whacko
PTE bit combinations we have to set to get the behavior.