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Date:   Wed, 19 Apr 2023 04:24:28 +0100
From:   Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>
To:     Waiman Long <longman@redhat.com>
Cc:     Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>, linux-mm@kvack.org,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Joe Mario <jmario@redhat.com>,
        Barry Marson <bmarson@redhat.com>,
        Rafael Aquini <aquini@redhat.com>,
        Paul Moore <paul@paul-moore.com>,
        Stephen Smalley <stephen.smalley.work@gmail.com>,
        Eric Paris <eparis@parisplace.org>, selinux@vger.kernel.org,
        James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>,
        "Serge E. Hallyn" <serge@hallyn.com>,
        linux-security-module@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] mm/mmap: Map MAP_STACK to VM_STACK
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On Tue, Apr 18, 2023 at 09:45:34PM -0400, Waiman Long wrote:
> 
> On 4/18/23 21:36, Hugh Dickins wrote:
> > On Tue, 18 Apr 2023, Waiman Long wrote:
> > > On 4/18/23 17:18, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > > > On Tue, 18 Apr 2023 17:02:30 -0400 Waiman Long <longman@redhat.com> wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > > One of the flags of mmap(2) is MAP_STACK to request a memory segment
> > > > > suitable for a process or thread stack. The kernel currently ignores
> > > > > this flags. Glibc uses MAP_STACK when mmapping a thread stack. However,
> > > > > selinux has an execstack check in selinux_file_mprotect() which disallows
> > > > > a stack VMA to be made executable.
> > > > > 
> > > > > Since MAP_STACK is a noop, it is possible for a stack VMA to be merged
> > > > > with an adjacent anonymous VMA. With that merging, using mprotect(2)
> > > > > to change a part of the merged anonymous VMA to make it executable may
> > > > > fail. This can lead to sporadic failure of applications that need to
> > > > > make those changes.
> > > > "Sporadic failure of applications" sounds quite serious.  Can you
> > > > provide more details?
> > > The problem boils down to the fact that it is possible for user code to mmap a
> > > region of memory and then for the kernel to merge the VMA for that memory with
> > > the VMA for one of the application's thread stacks. This is causing random
> > > SEGVs with one of our large customer application.
> > > 
> > > At a high level, this is what's happening:
> > > 
> > >  ?1) App runs creating lots of threads.
> > >  ?2) It mmap's 256K pages of anonymous memory.
> > >  ?3) It writes executable code to that memory.
> > >  ?4) It calls mprotect() with PROT_EXEC on that memory so
> > >  ??? it can subsequently execute the code.
> > > 
> > > The above mprotect() will fail if the mmap'd region's VMA gets merged with the
> > > VMA for one of the thread stacks.? That's because the default RHEL SELinux
> > > policy is to not allow executable stacks.
> > Then wouldn't the bug be at the SELinux end?  VMAs may have been merged
> > already, but the mprotect() with PROT_EXEC of the good non-stack range
> > will then split that area off from the stack again - maybe the SELinux
> > check does not understand that must happen?
> 
> The SELinux check is done per VMA, not a region within a VMA. After VMA
> merging, SELinux is probably not able to determine which part of a VMA is a
> stack unless we keep that information somewhere and provide an API for
> SELinux to query. That can be quite a lot of work. So the easiest way to
> prevent this problem is to avoid merging a stack VMA with a regular
> anonymous VMA.

To paraphrase you, "Yes, SELinux is buggy, but we don't want to fix it".

Cc'ing the SELinux people so it can be fixed properly.