[PATCH v4 1/2] userfaultfd: do not untag user pointers

Catalin Marinas catalin.marinas at arm.com
Thu Jul 8 05:58:42 PDT 2021


On Wed, Jul 07, 2021 at 11:43:12AM -0700, Peter Collingbourne wrote:
> 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. This will provide an
> early indication of problems with tag-unaware userspace code instead
> of letting the code get confused later, and is consistent with how
> we decided to handle brk/mmap/mremap in commit dcde237319e6 ("mm:
> Avoid creating virtual address aliases in brk()/mmap()/mremap()"),
> as well as being consistent with the existing tagged address ABI
> documentation relating to how ioctl arguments are handled.
> 
> The code change is a revert of commit 7d0325749a6c ("userfaultfd:
> untag user pointers") plus some fixups to some additional calls to
> validate_range that have appeared since then.
> 
> [1] https://source.android.com/devices/tech/debug/tagged-pointers
> [2] tools/testing/selftests/vm/userfaultfd.c
> 
> Signed-off-by: Peter Collingbourne <pcc at google.com>
> Reviewed-by: Andrey Konovalov <andreyknvl at gmail.com>
> Link: https://linux-review.googlesource.com/id/I761aa9f0344454c482b83fcfcce547db0a25501b
> Fixes: 63f0c6037965 ("arm64: Introduce prctl() options to control the tagged user addresses ABI")
> Cc: <stable at vger.kernel.org> # 5.4

Reviewed-by: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas at arm.com>



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