[RFC PATCH v11 06/29] KVM: Introduce KVM_SET_USER_MEMORY_REGION2
Paolo Bonzini
pbonzini at redhat.com
Mon Jul 31 08:58:08 PDT 2023
On 7/29/23 02:03, Sean Christopherson wrote:
> KVM would need to do multiple uaccess reads, but that's not a big
> deal. Am I missing something, or did past us just get too clever and
> miss the obvious solution?
You would have to introduce struct kvm_userspace_memory_region2 anyway,
though not a new ioctl, for two reasons:
1) the current size of the struct is part of the userspace API via the
KVM_SET_USER_MEMORY_REGION #define, so introducing a new struct is the
easiest way to preserve this
2) the struct can (at least theoretically) enter the ABI of a shared
library, and such mismatches are really hard to detect and resolve. So
it's better to add the padding to a new struct, and keep struct
kvm_userspace_memory_region backwards-compatible.
As to whether we should introduce a new ioctl: doing so makes
KVM_SET_USER_MEMORY_REGION's detection of bad flags a bit more robust;
it's not like we cannot introduce new flags at all, of course, but
having out-of-bounds reads as a side effect of new flags is a bit nasty.
Protecting programs from their own bugs gets into diminishing returns
very quickly, but introducing a new ioctl can make exploits a bit harder
when struct kvm_userspace_memory_region is on the stack and adjacent to
an attacker-controlled location.
Paolo
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