linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] lib/strscpy: avoid KASAN false positive

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Date:   Tue, 18 Jul 2017 23:15:34 +0300
From:   Andrey Ryabinin <aryabinin@...tuozzo.com>
To:     Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
Cc:     Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Dave Jones <davej@...emonkey.org.uk>,
        Alexander Potapenko <glider@...gle.com>,
        Dmitry Vyukov <dvyukov@...gle.com>, kasan-dev@...glegroups.com,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] lib/strscpy: avoid KASAN false positive

On 07/18/2017 08:22 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 18, 2017 at 10:15 AM, Andrey Ryabinin
> <aryabinin@...tuozzo.com> wrote:
>>
>> +       /*
>> +        * KASAN won't be happy about word-at-a-time
>> +        * optimistic reads, so let's avoid them.
>> +        */
>> +       if (IS_ENABLED(CONFIG_KASAN))
>> +               max = 0;
>> +
> 
> No, please don't.
> 
> Two reasons:
> 
>  (a) it turns out that KASAN doesn't actually warn about this when
> there aren't buggy users (because we only do word-at-a-time in the
> spacified-to-be-safe region anyway).
> 

No, it does warn about valid users. The report that Dave posted wasn't about wrong strscpy() usage
it was about reading 8-bytes from 5-bytes source string. It wasn't about buggy 'count' at all.
So KASAN will warn for perfectly valid code like this:
	char dest[16];
	strscpy(dest, "12345", sizeof(dest)):

Currently KASAN doesn't complain about strscpy() only because KASAN doesn't complain about unused code.
And after 077d2ba519b2e8bf1ab("replace incorrect strscpy use in FORTIFY_SOURCE") or before the
FORTIFY_SOURCE patch strscpy() is pretty much unused. Only 2 calls in some drivers, plus 3 in tile arch-code.



>  (b) havign automated testing that then just changes semantics and
> implementation of what is tested is a bad bad bad idea.
> 

I agree, but what choice do we have here?

> So (a) says that we shouldn't need it in the first place, and (b) says
> that we should avoid KASAN changing behavior unless we absolutely
> *have* to.
> 

(a) is wrong. I absolutely agree with (b) and I think that this is exactly
the case where we have to do this.

> In fact, I think we should *never* have that kind of "KASAN changes
> semantics". If there is some particular load that is known to be
> problematic for KASAN, we *still* shouldn't change semantics, we
> should just mark that single load as being unchecked by KASAN.

For strscpy() that would mean making the *whole* read from 'src' buffer unchecked by KASAN.

Although, we can always check the 'src' afterwards. But honestly, this looks shitty:

---
 lib/string.c | 9 +++++++--
 1 file changed, 7 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

diff --git a/lib/string.c b/lib/string.c
index ebbb99c775bd..5624b629bffa 100644
--- a/lib/string.c
+++ b/lib/string.c
@@ -23,6 +23,7 @@
 #include <linux/string.h>
 #include <linux/ctype.h>
 #include <linux/kernel.h>
+#include <linux/kasan-checks.h>
 #include <linux/export.h>
 #include <linux/bug.h>
 #include <linux/errno.h>
@@ -202,12 +203,15 @@ ssize_t strscpy(char *dest, const char *src, size_t count)
 	while (max >= sizeof(unsigned long)) {
 		unsigned long c, data;
 
-		c = *(unsigned long *)(src+res);
+		c = READ_ONCE_NOCHECK(*(unsigned long *)(src+res));
 		if (has_zero(c, &data, &constants)) {
 			data = prep_zero_mask(c, data, &constants);
 			data = create_zero_mask(data);
 			*(unsigned long *)(dest+res) = c & zero_bytemask(data);
-			return res + find_zero(data);
+
+			res = res + find_zero(data);
+			kasan_check_read(src, res);
+			return res;
 		}
 		*(unsigned long *)(dest+res) = c;
 		res += sizeof(unsigned long);
@@ -215,6 +219,7 @@ ssize_t strscpy(char *dest, const char *src, size_t count)
 		max -= sizeof(unsigned long);
 	}
 
+	kasan_check_read(src, res);
 	while (count) {
 		char c;
 
-- 
2.13.0