[PATCH 00/18] arm64: Unmap the kernel whilst running in userspace (KAISER)

[Ard Biesheuvel]

On 23 November 2017 at 17:54, Pavel Machek <pavel at ucw.cz> wrote:
> On Thu 2017-11-23 11:38:52, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
>> On 23 November 2017 at 10:46, Pavel Machek <pavel at ucw.cz> wrote:
>> > On Thu 2017-11-23 09:23:02, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
>> >> On 23 November 2017 at 09:07, Pavel Machek <pavel at ucw.cz> wrote:
>> >> > Hi!
>> >> >
>> >> >> > On 22 Nov 2017, at 23:37, Pavel Machek <pavel at ucw.cz> wrote:
>> >> >> >
>> >> >> > Hi!
>> >> >> >
>> >> >> >>>>> If I'm willing to do timing attacks to defeat KASLR... what prevents
>> >> >> >>>>> me from using CPU caches to do that?
>> >> >> >>>>>
>> >> >> >>>>
>> >> >> >>>> Because it is impossible to get a cache hit on an access to an
>> >> >> >>>> unmapped address?
>> >> >> >>>
>> >> >> >>> Um, no, I don't need to be able to directly access kernel addresses. I
>> >> >> >>> just put some data in _same place in cache where kernel data would
>> >> >> >>> go_, then do syscall and look if my data are still cached. Caches
>> >> >> >>> don't have infinite associativity.
>> >> >> >>>
>> >> >> >>
>> >> >> >> Ah ok. Interesting.
>> >> >> >>
>> >> >> >> But how does that leak address bits that are covered by the tag?
>> >> >> >
>> >> >> > Same as leaking any other address bits? Caches are "virtually
>> >> >> > indexed",
>> >> >>
>> >> >> Not on arm64, although I don’t see how that is relevant if you are trying to defeat kaslr.
>> >> >>
>> >> >> > and tag does not come into play...
>> >> >> >
>> >> >>
>> >> >> Well, I must be missing something then, because I don’t see how knowledge about which userland address shares a cache way with a kernel address can leak anything beyond the bits that make up the index (i.e., which cache way is being shared)
>> >> >>
>> >> >
>> >> > Well, KASLR is about keeping bits of kernel virtual address secret
>> >> > from userland. Leaking them through cache sidechannel means KASLR is
>> >> > defeated.
>> >> >
>> >>
>> >> Yes, that is what you claim. But you are not explaining how any of the
>> >> bits that we do want to keep secret can be discovered by making
>> >> inferences from which lines in a primed cache were evicted during a
>> >> syscall.
>> >>
>> >> The cache index maps to low order bits. You can use this, e.g., to
>> >> attack table based AES, because there is only ~4 KB worth of tables,
>> >> and you are interested in finding out which exact entries of the table
>> >> were read by the process under attack.
>> >>
>> >> You are saying the same approach will help you discover 30 high order
>> >> bits of a virtual kernel address, by observing the cache evictions in
>> >> a physically indexed physically tagged cache. How?
>> >
>> > I assumed high bits are hashed into cache index. I might have been
>> > wrong. Anyway, page tables are about same size as AES tables. So...:
>> >
>> > http://cve.circl.lu/cve/CVE-2017-5927
>> >
>>
>> Very interesting paper. Can you explain why you think its findings can
>> be extrapolated to apply to attacks across address spaces? Because
>> that is what would be required for it to be able to defeat KASLR.
>
> Can you explain why not?
>
> You clearly understand AES tables can be attacked cross-address-space,
> and there's no reason page tables could not be attacked same way. I'm
> not saying that's the best way to launch the attack, but it certainly
> looks possible to me.
>

There are two sides to this:
- on the one hand, a round trip into the kernel is quite likely to
result in many more cache evictions than the ones from which you will
be able to infer what address was being resolved by the page table
walker, adding noise to the signal,
- on the other hand, the kernel mappings are deliberately coarse
grained so that they can be cached in the TLB with literally only a
handful of entries, so it is not guaranteed that a TLB miss will occur
that results in a page table walk that you are interested in.

Given the statistical approach, it may simply mean taking more
samples, but how many more? 10x 100000x? Given that the current attack
takes 10s of seconds to mount, that is a significant limitation. For
the TLB side, it may help to mount an additional attack to prime the
TLB, but that itself is likely to add noise to the cache state
measurements.