linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 04/10] x86/cet: Handle thread shadow stack

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Message-ID: <6ee29e8b-4a0a-3459-a1ee-03923ba4e15d@redhat.com>
Date:   Fri, 8 Jun 2018 16:53:03 +0200
From:   Florian Weimer <fweimer@...hat.com>
To:     Andy Lutomirski <luto@...nel.org>
Cc:     Yu-cheng Yu <yu-cheng.yu@...el.com>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>, linux-doc@...r.kernel.org,
        Linux-MM <linux-mm@...ck.org>,
        linux-arch <linux-arch@...r.kernel.org>, X86 ML <x86@...nel.org>,
        "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@...hat.com>,
        "H. J. Lu" <hjl.tools@...il.com>,
        "Shanbhogue, Vedvyas" <vedvyas.shanbhogue@...el.com>,
        "Ravi V. Shankar" <ravi.v.shankar@...el.com>,
        Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@...ux.intel.com>,
        Jonathan Corbet <corbet@....net>,
        Oleg Nesterov <oleg@...hat.com>, Arnd Bergmann <arnd@...db.de>,
        mike.kravetz@...cle.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH 04/10] x86/cet: Handle thread shadow stack

On 06/07/2018 10:53 PM, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 7, 2018 at 12:47 PM Florian Weimer <fweimer@...hat.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 06/07/2018 08:21 PM, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
>>> On Thu, Jun 7, 2018 at 7:41 AM Yu-cheng Yu <yu-cheng.yu@...el.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> When fork() specifies CLONE_VM but not CLONE_VFORK, the child
>>>> needs a separate program stack and a separate shadow stack.
>>>> This patch handles allocation and freeing of the thread shadow
>>>> stack.
>>>
>>> Aha -- you're trying to make this automatic.  I'm not convinced this
>>> is a good idea.  The Linux kernel has a long and storied history of
>>> enabling new hardware features in ways that are almost entirely
>>> useless for userspace.
>>>
>>> Florian, do you have any thoughts on how the user/kernel interaction
>>> for the shadow stack should work?
>>
>> I have not looked at this in detail, have not played with the emulator,
>> and have not been privy to any discussions before these patches have
>> been posted, however …
>>
>> I believe that we want as little code in userspace for shadow stack
>> management as possible.  One concern I have is that even with the code
>> we arguably need for various kinds of stack unwinding, we might have
>> unwittingly built a generic trampoline that leads to full CET bypass.
> 
> I was imagining an API like "allocate a shadow stack for the current
> thread, fail if the current thread already has one, and turn on the
> shadow stack".  glibc would call clone and then call this ABI pretty
> much immediately (i.e. before making any calls from which it expects
> to return).

Ahh.  So you propose not to enable shadow stack enforcement on the new 
thread even if it is enabled for the current thread?  For the cases 
where CLONE_VM is involved?

It will still need a new assembler wrapper which sets up the shadow 
stack, and it's probably required to disable signals.

I think it should be reasonable safe and actually implementable.  But 
the benefits are not immediately obvious to me.

> We definitely want strong enough user control that tools like CRIU can
> continue to work.  I haven't looked at the SDM recently enough to
> remember for sure, but I'm reasonably confident that user code can
> learn the address of its own shadow stack.  If nothing else, CRIU
> needs to be able to restore from a context where there's a signal on
> the stack and the signal frame contains a shadow stack pointer.

CRIU also needs the shadow stack *contents*, which shouldn't be directly 
available to the process.  So it needs very special interfaces anyway.

Does CRIU implement MPX support?

Thanks,
Florian