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Subject: Re: [systemd-devel] BTI interaction between seccomp filters in
 systemd and glibc mprotect calls, causing service failures
To:     Florian Weimer <fweimer@redhat.com>,
        Lennart Poettering <mzxreary@0pointer.de>
Cc:     Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@arm.com>,
        systemd-devel@lists.freedesktop.org,
        Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>,
        Catalin Marinas <Catalin.Marinas@arm.com>,
        Will Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com>,
        "linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Mark Brown <broonie@kernel.org>, libc-alpha@sourceware.org,
        Dave Martin <dave.martin@arm.com>,
        "linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org" 
        <linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org>
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 <20201022071812.GA324655@gardel-login>
 <87sga6snjn.fsf@oldenburg2.str.redhat.com>
From:   Topi Miettinen <toiwoton@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <511318fd-efde-f2fc-9159-9d16ac8d33a7@gmail.com>
Date:   Thu, 22 Oct 2020 11:17:19 +0300
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On 22.10.2020 10.54, Florian Weimer wrote:
> * Lennart Poettering:
> 
>> On Mi, 21.10.20 22:44, Jeremy Linton (jeremy.linton@arm.com) wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> There is a problem with glibc+systemd on BTI enabled systems. Systemd
>>> has a service flag "MemoryDenyWriteExecute" which uses seccomp to deny
>>> PROT_EXEC changes. Glibc enables BTI only on segments which are marked as
>>> being BTI compatible by calling mprotect PROT_EXEC|PROT_BTI. That call is
>>> caught by the seccomp filter, resulting in service failures.
>>>
>>> So, at the moment one has to pick either denying PROT_EXEC changes, or BTI.
>>> This is obviously not desirable.
>>>
>>> Various changes have been suggested, replacing the mprotect with mmap calls
>>> having PROT_BTI set on the original mapping, re-mmapping the segments,
>>> implying PROT_EXEC on mprotect PROT_BTI calls when VM_EXEC is already set,
>>> and various modification to seccomp to allow particular mprotect cases to
>>> bypass the filters. In each case there seems to be an undesirable attribute
>>> to the solution.
>>>
>>> So, whats the best solution?
>>
>> Did you see Topi's comments on the systemd issue?
>>
>> https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/17368#issuecomment-710485532
>>
>> I think I agree with this: it's a bit weird to alter the bits after
>> the fact. Can't glibc set up everything right from the begining? That
>> would keep both concepts working.
> 
> The dynamic loader has to process the LOAD segments to get to the ELF
> note that says to enable BTI.  Maybe we could do a first pass and load
> only the segments that cover notes.  But that requires lots of changes
> to generic code in the loader.

What if the loader always enabled BTI for PROT_EXEC pages, but then when 
discovering that this was a mistake, mprotect() the pages without BTI? 
Then both BTI and MDWX would work and the penalty of not getting MDWX 
would fall to non-BTI programs. What's the expected proportion of BTI 
enabled code vs. disabled in the future, is it perhaps expected that a 
distro would enable the flag globally so eventually only a few legacy 
programs might be unprotected?

-Topi