Message-Id: <B413445A-F1F0-4FB7-AA9F-C5FF4CEFF5F5@amacapital.net>
Date:   Thu, 6 Feb 2020 12:02:36 -0800
From:   Andy Lutomirski <luto@...capital.net>
To:     Kristen Carlson Accardi <kristen@...ux.intel.com>
Cc:     Kees Cook <keescook@...omium.org>, tglx@...utronix.de,
        mingo@...hat.com, bp@...en8.de, hpa@...or.com,
        arjan@...ux.intel.com, rick.p.edgecombe@...el.com, x86@...nel.org,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, kernel-hardening@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 06/11] x86: make sure _etext includes function sections



> On Feb 6, 2020, at 11:41 AM, Kristen Carlson Accardi <kristen@...ux.intel.com> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 2020-02-06 at 04:26 -0800, Kees Cook wrote:
>>> On Wed, Feb 05, 2020 at 02:39:45PM -0800, Kristen Carlson Accardi
>>> wrote:
>>> We will be using -ffunction-sections to place each function in
>>> it's own text section so it can be randomized at load time. The
>>> linker considers these .text.* sections "orphaned sections", and
>>> will place them after the first similar section (.text). However,
>>> we need to move _etext so that it is after both .text and .text.*
>>> We also need to calculate text size to include .text AND .text.*
>> 
>> The dependency on the linker's orphan section handling is, I feel,
>> rather fragile (during work on CFI and generally building kernels
>> with
>> Clang's LLD linker, we keep tripping over difference between how BFD
>> and
>> LLD handle orphans). However, this is currently no way to perform a
>> section "pass through" where input sections retain their name as an
>> output section. (If anyone knows a way to do this, I'm all ears).
>> 
>> Right now, you can only collect sections like this:
>> 
>>        .text :  AT(ADDR(.text) - LOAD_OFFSET) {
>>        *(.text.*)
>>    }
>> 
>> or let them be orphans, which then the linker attempts to find a
>> "similar" (code, data, etc) section to put them near:
>> https://sourceware.org/binutils/docs-2.33.1/ld/Orphan-Sections.html
>> 
>> So, basically, yes, this works, but I'd like to see BFD and LLD grow
>> some kind of /PASSTHRU/ special section (like /DISCARD/), that would
>> let
>> a linker script specify _where_ these sections should roughly live.
>> 
>> Related thoughts:
>> 
>> I know x86_64 stack alignment is 16 bytes. I cannot find evidence for
>> what function start alignment should be. It seems the linker is 16
>> byte
>> aligning these functions, when I think no alignment is needed for
>> function starts, so we're wasting some memory (average 8 bytes per
>> function, at say 50,000 functions, so approaching 512KB) between
>> functions. If we can specify a 1 byte alignment for these orphan
>> sections, that would be nice, as mentioned in the cover letter: we
>> lose
>> a 4 bits of entropy to this alignment, since all randomized function
>> addresses will have their low bits set to zero.
> 
> So, when I was developing this patch set, I initially ignored the value
> of sh_addralign and just packed the functions in one right after
> another when I did the new layout. They were byte aligned :). I later
> realized that I should probably pay attention to alignment and thus
> started respecting the value that was in sh_addralign. There is
> actually nothing stopping me from ignoring it again, other than I am
> concerned that I will make runtime performance suffer even more than I
> already have.

If you start randomizing *data* sections, then alignment matters.

Also, in the shiny new era of Intel-CPUs-can’t-handle-Jcc-spanning-a-cacheline, function alignment may actually matter.  Sigh.  The symptom will be horrible maybe-exploitable crashes on old microcode and “minimal performance impact” on new microcode. In this context, “minimal” may actually mean “huge, throw away your CPU and replace it with one from a different vendor.”

Of course, there doesn’t appear to be anything resembling credible public documentation for any of this.

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