Date:	Fri, 11 Oct 2013 15:26:41 +0400
From:	Dmitry Vyukov <dvyukov@...gle.com>
To:	Richard Weinberger <richard@....at>
Cc:	Richard Weinberger <richard.weinberger@...il.com>,
	Al Viro <viro@...iv.linux.org.uk>,
	Kees Cook <keescook@...omium.org>,
	LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	"linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] fs: make sure we do not read beyond allocation

On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 5:53 PM, Richard Weinberger <richard@....at> wrote:
> Am 04.10.2013 12:53, schrieb Dmitry Vyukov:
>> On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 2:38 PM, Richard Weinberger
>> <richard.weinberger@...il.com> wrote:
>>>>>>> ...
>>>>>>> [1] yes, yes, I know - the mere mention of security should've prevented such
>>>>>>> arrogant requests.  It's an imperfect universe.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I want to attempt to disassemble what you've communicating here:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> a) I'm not thinking.
>>>>>> b) Requesting that someone think when they mention security is arrogant.
>>>>>
>>>>> Not really.
>>>>>
>>>>> It's just that all too often completely pointless changes are touted
>>>>> as security hardening.  With replies along the lines of "it doesn't
>>>>> really buy you anything" countered with indignant "but what if
>>>>> <impossible situation>" and/or references to "defense in depth" (used
>>>>> as a magical incantation), etc.
>>>>>
>>>>> You've posted a provably pointless patch.  Happens to all of us.  And in
>>>>> reply to "it's pointless for the following reasons" (with moderate
>>>>> level of sarcasm) you responded pretty much with "but what if allocator
>>>>> changes?  It's more robust that way".  OK, but if you go for that
>>>>> kind of arguments (and they can be valid), you'd better be correct.
>>>>> You were not, and for very obvious reasons.  Let me repeat, this
>>>>> time with sarcasm level down to zero:
>>>>>
>>>>> Let n be some integer between 32 and 4096 and N be equal to n rounded up
>>>>> to word size.  If kmalloc(n) returns a pointer such that fetch from
>>>>> (char *)p[N - 1] triggers an exception, we have a badly broken kernel.
>>>>> It can happen only if there is a page boundary between p[n-1] and p[N-1],
>>>>> which means that p is not word-aligned.
>>>>> Consider the following code:
>>>>>         struct foo {
>>>>>                 unsigned long n;
>>>>>                 char a[];
>>>>>         } *p = kmalloc(offsetof(struct foo, a) + 33);
>>>>>         if (p)
>>>>>                 p->n = 1;
>>>>> and note that it will result in an exception on any architecture that prohibits
>>>>> unaligned accesses in the kernel.  Even on architectures where those are
>>>>> allowed, misaligned structures mean serious correctness problems (atomicity of
>>>>> stores, etc.)
>>>>>
>>>>> In other words, kmalloc() (or, indeed, userland malloc()) demonstrating
>>>>> such behaviour would need immediate fixing.  The only exception I can
>>>>> think of is something with byte granularity of memory protection; in such
>>>>> case we can have that without unaligned return values returned by allocator.
>>>>> Which would require a lot of changes in mm/*, at the very least, and probably
>>>>> would violate a lot of assumptions elsewhere in the kernel (starting with
>>>>> sizeof(void *) == sizeof(unsigned long)).
>>>>>
>>>>>> What the patch does help with, though, is dynamic analysis tools that
>>>>>> are looking for out-of-bound reads, which this clearly is. It should
>>>>>> be considered a violation of the API to attempt to access a range
>>>>>> beyond what was requested for the allocation. Fixing this means lots
>>>>>> of noise vanishes from such analysis of the allocation API, letting
>>>>>> other tools besides just KASAN do work to find other more serious
>>>>>> problems in heap usage.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Does fixing this to help dynamic analysis tools somehow make the
>>>>>> kernel worse? I think that fixing this makes it easier to find further
>>>>>> bugs that might be much more serious.
>>>>>
>>>>> Possibly true.  But then I'd suggest wrapping that into a different ifdef;
>>>>> grep for ifdef __CHECKER__, with comment along the lines of "to simplify
>>>>> analysis of potential out-of-bounds accesses".
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> Any single reason to not just fix the code?
>>>>
>>>> With this patch:
>>>> + sticks with "do not access beyond request size", which is a good
>>>> thing all others equal
>>>> + makes static and dynamic verification tools happy
>>>> - ???
>>>
>>> - It does not fix anything, it only shuts up the checker
>>> - It adds another ifdef where it is not obvious why it's needed
>>>
>>> Therefore it makes more sense to add a ifdef __CHECKER__ such that
>>> everyone immediately knows that the issue is only false positive.
>>
>>
>> OK, is it explicitly documented somewhere that it's legal to access
>> memory blocks beyond requested size? Is it a deliberate decision made
>> by community? Or just an ad-hoc argument based on details of current
>> implementation?
>
> Al explained already why it is legal.
>
>> If it's the former then we will need to teach the tools to understand
>> it. But IMVHO it's a very unfortunate decision, because it will hide
>> real harmful bugs. And this is the only place where I observed such
>> out-of-bounds access after months of stress testing, so we are not
>> talking about hundreds and thousands of precedents. We are talking
>> about this particular case vs ability of tools to catch harmful
>> off-by-one accesses to variable-length strings and buffers.
>
> Have you ever used valgrind (or any other checkers in userspace)?
> They all suffer from such issues.
> If a checker reports a violation it is not always a real one and
> you have to review it carefully.

I am not sure why you call it not a real one. Both C and C++ standards
are pretty clear on this: it is undefined behavior.
That said, Valgrind/memcheck indeed has other false positives, because
it tries to reason about source code looking only at the binary. This
can not possibly work.
AddressSanitizer
(https://sites.google.com/a/google.com/dynamic-tools/addresssanitizer)
does not have known false positives.
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