linux-kernel - RE: [PATCH 18/35] mm: Add guard pages around a shadow stack.

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Message-ID: <09ed01cc5e564ef78875b18001955bb1@AcuMS.aculab.com>
Date:   Fri, 11 Feb 2022 09:08:45 +0000
From:   David Laight <David.Laight@...LAB.COM>
To:     "'Edgecombe, Rick P'" <rick.p.edgecombe@...el.com>,
        "Shankar, Ravi V" <ravi.v.shankar@...el.com>,
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CC:     "Yu, Yu-cheng" <yu-cheng.yu@...el.com>
Subject: RE: [PATCH 18/35] mm: Add guard pages around a shadow stack.

From: Edgecombe, Rick P
> Sent: 10 February 2022 23:43
> 
> On Thu, 2022-02-10 at 22:38 +0000, David Laight wrote:
> > Do you need a real guard page?
> > Or is it just enough to ensure that the adjacent page isn't another
> > shadow stack page?
> >
> > Any other page will cause a fault because the PTE isn't
> > readonly+dirty.
> >
> > I'm not sure how common single page allocates are in Linux.
> 
> I think it came from this discussion:
> 
> https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAG48ez1ytOfQyNZMNPFp7XqKcpd7_aRai9G5s7rx0V=8ZG+r2A@mail.gmail.com/#t
> 
> > But adjacent shadow stacks may be rare anyway.
> > So a check against both adjacent PTE entries would suffice.
> > Or maybe always allocate an even (or odd) numbered page.
> 
> It just needs to not be adjacent to shadow stack memory to do the job.
> Would that be small to implement? It might be a tradeoff of code
> complexity.

That's what I thought.
Although the VA use for guard pages might be a problem in itself.

I'm not sure why I thought shadow stacks would be a single page.
For user space that 'only' allows 512 calls.
For kernel it is a massive waste of memory.
It is probably worth putting multiple kernel shadow stacks into the same page.
(Code that can overrun can do other stuff more easily.)

The hardware engineers failed to think about the implementation (again).
The shadow stack should (probably) run in the opposite direction to
the normal stack.
Then the shadow stack can be placed at the other end of the VA allocated
to a user space stack.

	David

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