linux-kernel - [PATCH 0/2] KVM: nVMX: Bug fix for consuming stale vmcs02.GUEST

lists.openwall.net		lists / announce owl-users owl-dev john-users john-dev passwdqc-users yescrypt popa3d-users / oss-security kernel-hardening musl sabotage tlsify passwords / crypt-dev xvendor / Bugtraq Full-Disclosure linux-kernel linux-netdev linux-ext4 linux-hardening linux-cve-announce PHC
Open Source and information security mailing list archives

Hash Suite: Windows password security audit tool. GUI, reports in PDF.

[<prev] [next>] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]

Date:   Thu, 26 Sep 2019 14:43:00 -0700
From:   Sean Christopherson <sean.j.christopherson@...el.com>
To:     Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@...hat.com>,
        Radim Krčmář <rkrcmar@...hat.com>
Cc:     Sean Christopherson <sean.j.christopherson@...el.com>,
        Vitaly Kuznetsov <vkuznets@...hat.com>,
        Wanpeng Li <wanpengli@...cent.com>,
        Jim Mattson <jmattson@...gle.com>,
        Joerg Roedel <joro@...tes.org>, kvm@...r.kernel.org,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, Reto Buerki <reet@...elabs.ch>
Subject: [PATCH 0/2] KVM: nVMX: Bug fix for consuming stale vmcs02.GUEST_CR3

Reto Buerki reported a failure in a nested VMM when running with HLT
interception disabled in L1.  When putting L2 into HLT, KVM never actually
enters L2 and instead cancels the nested run and pretends that VM-Enter to
L2 completed and then exited on HLT (which KVM intercepted).  Because KVM
never actually runs L2, KVM skips the pending MMU update for L2 and so
leaves a stale value in vmcs02.GUEST_CR3.  If the next wake event for L2
triggers a nested VM-Exit, KVM will refresh vmcs12->guest_cr3 from
vmcs02.GUEST_CR3 and consume the stale value.

Fix the issue by unconditionally writing vmcs02.GUEST_CR3 during nested
VM-Enter instead of deferring the update to vmx_set_cr3(), and skip the
update of GUEST_CR3 in vmx_set_cr3() when running L2.  I.e. make the
nested code fully responsible for vmcs02.GUEST_CR3.

I really wanted to go with a different fix of handling this as a one-off
case in the HLT flow (in nested_vmx_run()), and then following that up
with a cleanup of VMX's CR3 handling, e.g. to do proper dirty tracking
instead of having the nested code do manual VMREADs and VMWRITEs.  I even
went so far as to hide vcpu->arch.cr3 (put CR3 in vcpu->arch.regs), but
things went south when I started working through the dirty tracking logic.

Because EPT can be enabled *without* unrestricted guest, enabling EPT
doesn't always mean GUEST_CR3 really is the guest CR3 (unlike SVM's NPT).
And because the unrestricted guest handling of GUEST_CR3 is dependent on
whether the guest has paging enabled, VMX can't even do a clean handoff
based on unrestricted guest.  In a nutshell, dynamically handling the
transitions of GUEST_CR3 ownership in VMX is a nightmare, so fixing this
purely within the context of nested VMX turned out to be the cleanest fix.

Sean Christopherson (2):
  KVM: nVMX: Always write vmcs02.GUEST_CR3 during nested VM-Enter
  KVM: VMX: Skip GUEST_CR3 VMREAD+VMWRITE if the VMCS is up-to-date

 arch/x86/kvm/vmx/nested.c |  8 ++++++++
 arch/x86/kvm/vmx/vmx.c    | 15 ++++++++++-----
 2 files changed, 18 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)

-- 
2.22.0