[PATCH 1/2] kasan, mm: reset tag when access metadata

Kuan-Ying Lee Kuan-Ying.Lee at mediatek.com
Wed Jul 28 04:05:07 PDT 2021


On Tue, 2021-07-27 at 20:22 +0100, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 27, 2021 at 04:32:02PM +0800, Kuan-Ying Lee wrote:
> > On Tue, 2021-07-27 at 09:10 +0200, Marco Elver wrote:
> > > +Cc Catalin
> > > 
> > > On Tue, 27 Jul 2021 at 06:00, Kuan-Ying Lee <
> > > Kuan-Ying.Lee at mediatek.com> wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > Hardware tag-based KASAN doesn't use compiler instrumentation,
> > > > we
> > > > can not use kasan_disable_current() to ignore tag check.
> > > > 
> > > > Thus, we need to reset tags when accessing metadata.
> > > > 
> > > > Signed-off-by: Kuan-Ying Lee <Kuan-Ying.Lee at mediatek.com>
> > > 
> > > This looks reasonable, but the patch title is not saying this is
> > > kmemleak, nor does the description say what the problem is. What
> > > problem did you encounter? Was it a false positive?
> > 
> > kmemleak would scan kernel memory to check memory leak.
> > When it scans on the invalid slab and dereference, the issue
> > will occur like below.
> > 
> > So I think we should reset the tag before scanning.
> > 
> > # echo scan > /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak
> > [  151.905804]
> > ==================================================================
> > [  151.907120] BUG: KASAN: out-of-bounds in scan_block+0x58/0x170
> > [  151.908773] Read at addr f7ff0000c0074eb0 by task kmemleak/138
> > [  151.909656] Pointer tag: [f7], memory tag: [fe]
> 
> It would be interesting to find out why the tag doesn't match.
> Kmemleak
> should in principle only scan valid objects that have been allocated
> and
> the pointer can be safely dereferenced. 0xfe is KASAN_TAG_INVALID, so
> it
> either goes past the size of the object (into the red zone) or it
> still
> accesses the object after it was marked as freed but before being
> released from kmemleak.
> 
> With slab, looking at __cache_free(), it calls kasan_slab_free()
> before
> ___cache_free() -> kmemleak_free_recursive(), so the second scenario
> is
> possible. With slub, however, slab_free_hook() first releases the
> object
> from kmemleak before poisoning it. Based on the stack dump, you are
> using slub, so it may be that kmemleak goes into the object red
> zones.
> 
> I'd like this clarified before blindly resetting the tag.

This kasan issue only happened on hardware tag-based kasan mode.
Because kasan_disable_current() works for generic and sw tag-based
kasan.

HW tag-based kasan depends on slub so slab will not hit this
issue.
I think we can just check if HW tag-based kasan is enabled or not
and decide to reset the tag as below.

if (kasan_has_integrated_init()) // slub case, hw-tag kasan
	pointer = *(unsigned long *)kasan_reset_tag((void *)ptr);
else
	pointer = *ptr; // slab

Is this better or any other suggestions?
Any suggestion is appreciated.

Thanks,
Kuan-Ying Lee

> 


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