[kernel-hardening] Re: [PATCH v9 1/4] syscalls: Verify address limit before returning to user-mode

[Kees Cook]

On Mon, May 8, 2017 at 11:56 PM, Ingo Molnar <mingo at kernel.org> wrote:
>
> * Kees Cook <keescook at chromium.org> wrote:
>
>> > There's the option of using GCC plugins now that the infrastructure was
>> > upstreamed from grsecurity. It can be used as part of the regular build
>> > process and as long as the analysis is pretty simple it shouldn't hurt compile
>> > time much.
>>
>> Well, and that the situation may arise due to memory corruption, not from
>> poorly-matched set_fs() calls, which static analysis won't help solve. We need
>> to catch this bad kernel state because it is a very bad state to run in.

[attempting some thread-merging]

> Ok, so that's CVE-2010-4258, where an oops with KERNEL_DS set was used to escalate
> privileges, due to the kernel's oops handler not cleaning up the KERNEL_DS. The
> exploit used another bug, a crash in a network protocol handler, to execute the
> oops handler with KERNEL_DS set.

Right, I didn't mean to suggest that vulnerability would be fixed by
this solution. I was trying to show how there can be some pretty
complex interaction with exceptions/interrupts/etc that would make
pure static analysis still miss things.

> If memory corruption corrupted the task state into having addr_limit set to
> KERNEL_DS then there's already a fair chance that it's game over: it could also
> have set *uid to 0, or changed a sensitive PF_ flag, or a number of other
> things...
>
> Furthermore, think about it: there's literally an infinite amount of corrupted
> task states that could be a security problem and that could be checked after every
> system call. Do we want to check every one of them?

Right, but this "slippery slope" argument isn't the best way to reject
security changes. Let me take a step back and describe the threat, and
where we should likely spend time:

The primary threat with addr_limit getting changed is that a
narrowly-scoped attack (traditionally stack exhaustion or
adjacent-stack large-index writes) could be leveraged into opening the
entire kernel to writes (by allowing all syscalls with a
copy_to_user() call to suddenly be able to write to kernel memory).
So, really, the flaw is having addr_limit at all. Removing set_fs()
should, I think, allow this to become a const (or at least should get
us a lot closer).

The main path to corrupting addr_limit has been via stack corruption.
On architectures with CONFIG_THREAD_INFO_IN_TASK, this risk is greatly
reduced already, but it's not universally available yet. (And as long
as we're talking about stack attacks, CONFIG_VMAP_STACK makes
cross-stack overflows go away, and cross-stack indexing harder, but
that's not really about addr_limit since currently nothing with
VMAP_STACK doesn't already have THREAD_INFO_IN_TASK.)

So, left with a still exploitable target in memory that allows such an
expansion of attack method, I still think it's worth keeping this
patch series, but if we can drop set_fs() I could probably be
convinced the benefit of the series doesn't exceed the cost on
THREAD_INFO_IN_TASK-architectures (x86, arm64, s390). But that means
at least currently keeping it on arm, for example. If we can make
addr_limit const, well, we don't need the series at all.

-Kees

-- 
Kees Cook
Pixel Security