Subject: Re: [PATCH v6 00/11] Add support for eXclusive Page Frame Ownership
To: Yisheng Xie <xieyisheng1@huawei.com>,
        Tycho Andersen <tycho@docker.com>
References: <20170907173609.22696-1-tycho@docker.com>
 <23e5bac9-329a-3a32-049e-7e7c9751abd0@huawei.com>
 <20170911150204.nn5v5olbxyzfafou@docker>
 <60c4ad22-d920-2754-30dd-b1f228c0a87d@huawei.com>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-mm@kvack.org,
        kernel-hardening@lists.openwall.com,
        Marco Benatto <marco.antonio.780@gmail.com>
From: Juerg Haefliger <juerg.haefliger@canonical.com>
Message-ID: <5af82d7a-474f-aba7-d58e-f028627f8723@canonical.com>
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2017 09:40:14 +0200
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On 09/12/2017 09:07 AM, Yisheng Xie wrote:
> Hi Tycho,
> 
> On 2017/9/11 23:02, Tycho Andersen wrote:
>> Hi Yisheng,
>>
>> On Mon, Sep 11, 2017 at 06:34:45PM +0800, Yisheng Xie wrote:
>>> Hi Tycho ,
>>>
>>> On 2017/9/8 1:35, Tycho Andersen wrote:
>>>> Hi all,
>>>>
>>>> Here is v6 of the XPFO set; see v5 discussion here:
>>>> https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/9/803
>>>>
>>>> Changelogs are in the individual patch notes, but the highlights are:
>>>> * add primitives for ensuring memory areas are mapped (although these are quite
>>>>   ugly, using stack allocation; I'm open to better suggestions)
>>>> * instead of not flushing caches, re-map pages using the above
>>>> * TLB flushing is much more correct (i.e. we're always flushing everything
>>>>   everywhere). I suspect we may be able to back this off in some cases, but I'm
>>>>   still trying to collect performance numbers to prove this is worth doing.
>>>>
>>>> I have no TODOs left for this set myself, other than fixing whatever review
>>>> feedback people have. Thoughts and testing welcome!
>>>
>>> According to the paper of Vasileios P. Kemerlis et al, the mainline kernel
>>> will not set the Pro. of physmap(direct map area) to RW(X), so do we really
>>> need XPFO to protect from ret2dir attack?
>>
>> I guess you're talking about section 4.3? 
> Yes
> 
>> They mention that that x86
>> only gets rw, but that aarch64 is rwx still.
> IIRC, the in kernel of v4.13 the aarch64 is not rwx, I will check it.
> 
>>
>> But in either case this still provides access protection, similar to
>> SMAP. Also, if I understand things correctly the protections are
>> unmanaged, so a page that had the +x bit set at some point, it could
>> be used for ret2dir.
> So you means that the Pro. of direct map area maybe changed to +x, then ret2dir attack can use it?

XPFO protects against malicious reads from userspace (potentially
accessing sensitive data). I've also been told by a security expert that
ROP attacks are still possible even if user space memory is
non-executable. XPFO is supposed to prevent that but I haven't been able
to confirm this. It's way out of my comfort zone.

...Juerg


> Thanks
> Yisheng Xie
> 
>