[PATCH v4 0/2] userfaultfd: do not untag user pointers

Peter Collingbourne pcc at google.com
Wed Jul 7 11:43:11 PDT 2021


If a user program uses userfaultfd on ranges of heap memory, it may
end up passing a tagged pointer to the kernel in the range.start
field of the UFFDIO_REGISTER ioctl. This can happen when using an
MTE-capable allocator, or on Android if using the Tagged Pointers
feature for MTE readiness [1].

When a fault subsequently occurs, the tag is stripped from the fault
address returned to the application in the fault.address field
of struct uffd_msg. However, from the application's perspective,
the tagged address *is* the memory address, so if the application
is unaware of memory tags, it may get confused by receiving an
address that is, from its point of view, outside of the bounds of the
allocation. We observed this behavior in the kselftest for userfaultfd
[2] but other applications could have the same problem.

Address this by not untagging pointers passed to the userfaultfd
ioctls. Instead, let the system call fail. Also change the kselftest
to use mmap so that it doesn't encounter this problem.

[1] https://source.android.com/devices/tech/debug/tagged-pointers
[2] tools/testing/selftests/vm/userfaultfd.c

Peter Collingbourne (2):
  userfaultfd: do not untag user pointers
  selftest: use mmap instead of posix_memalign to allocate memory

 Documentation/arm64/tagged-address-abi.rst | 26 +++++++++++++++-------
 fs/userfaultfd.c                           | 26 ++++++++++------------
 tools/testing/selftests/vm/userfaultfd.c   |  6 +++--
 3 files changed, 34 insertions(+), 24 deletions(-)

-- 
2.32.0.93.g670b81a890-goog




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