Date: Thu, 29 Jun 2017 11:56:47 -0600
From: Tycho Andersen <tycho@docker.com>
To: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>, Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        Laura Abbott <labbott@redhat.com>,
        Daniel Micay <danielmicay@gmail.com>,
        Pekka Enberg <penberg@kernel.org>,
        David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>,
        Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com>,
        "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>, Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>,
        Andy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org>,
        Nicolas Pitre <nicolas.pitre@linaro.org>, Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>,
        Daniel Mack <daniel@zonque.org>,
        Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <bigeasy@linutronix.de>,
        Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky@gmail.com>,
        Helge Deller <deller@gmx.de>, LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Linux-MM <linux-mm@kvack.org>,
        "kernel-hardening@lists.openwall.com" 
        <kernel-hardening@lists.openwall.com>
Subject: Re: [kernel-hardening] Re: [PATCH v2] mm: Add SLUB free list pointer
 obfuscation
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On Thu, Jun 29, 2017 at 01:54:13PM -0400, Rik van Riel wrote:
> On Thu, 2017-06-29 at 10:47 -0700, Kees Cook wrote:
> > On Thu, Jun 29, 2017 at 10:05 AM, Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>
> > wrote:
> > > On Sun, 25 Jun 2017, Kees Cook wrote:
> > > 
> > > > The difference gets lost in the noise, but if the above is
> > > > sensible,
> > > > it's 0.07% slower. ;)
> > > 
> > > Hmmm... These differences add up. Also in a repetative benchmark
> > > like that
> > > you do not see the impact that the additional cacheline use in the
> > > cpu
> > > cache has on larger workloads. Those may be pushed over the edge of
> > > l1 or
> > > l2 capacity at some point which then causes drastic regressions.
> > 
> > Even if that is true, it may be worth it to some people to have the
> > protection. Given that is significantly hampers a large class of heap
> > overflow attacks[1], I think it's an important change to have. I'm
> > not
> > suggesting this be on by default, it's cleanly behind
> > CONFIG-controlled macros, and is very limited in scope. If you can
> > Ack
> > it we can let system builders decide if they want to risk a possible
> > performance hit. I'm pretty sure most distros would like to have this
> > protection.
> 
> I could certainly see it being useful for all kinds of portable
> and network-connected systems where security is simply much
> more important than performance.

Indeed, I believe we would enable this in our kernels.

Cheers,

Tycho