[PATCH v7 0/9] KFENCE: A low-overhead sampling-based memory safety error detector

[Marco Elver]

On Wed, 4 Nov 2020 at 01:31, Andrew Morton <akpm at linux-foundation.org> wrote:
> On Tue,  3 Nov 2020 18:58:32 +0100 Marco Elver <elver at google.com> wrote:
>
> > This adds the Kernel Electric-Fence (KFENCE) infrastructure. KFENCE is a
> > low-overhead sampling-based memory safety error detector of heap
> > use-after-free, invalid-free, and out-of-bounds access errors.  This
> > series enables KFENCE for the x86 and arm64 architectures, and adds
> > KFENCE hooks to the SLAB and SLUB allocators.
> >
> > KFENCE is designed to be enabled in production kernels, and has near
> > zero performance overhead. Compared to KASAN, KFENCE trades performance
> > for precision. The main motivation behind KFENCE's design, is that with
> > enough total uptime KFENCE will detect bugs in code paths not typically
> > exercised by non-production test workloads. One way to quickly achieve a
> > large enough total uptime is when the tool is deployed across a large
> > fleet of machines.
>
> Has kfence detected any kernel bugs yet?  What is its track record?

Not yet, but once we deploy in various production kernels, we expect
to find new bugs (we'll report back with results once deployed).
Especially in drivers or subsystems that syzkaller+KASAN can't touch,
e.g. where real devices are required to get coverage. We expect to
have first results on this within 3 months, and can start backports
now that KFENCE for mainline is being finalized. This will likely also
make it into Android, but deployment there will take much longer.

The story is similar with the user space version of the tool
(GWP-ASan), where results started to materialize once it was deployed
across the fleet.

> Will a kfence merge permit us to remove some other memory debugging
> subsystem?  We seem to have rather a lot of them.

Nothing obvious I think. KFENCE is unique in that it is meant for
production fleets of machines (with ~zero overhead and no new HW
features), with the caveat that due to it being sampling based, it's
not so suitable for single machine testing. The other debugging tools
are suitable for the latter, but not former.

Thanks,
-- Marco