Re: Regression: Requiring CAP_SYS_ADMIN for /proc/<pid>/pagemap causes application-level breakage

[Andy Lutomirski]

On Fri, Apr 24, 2015 at 9:08 AM, Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 24, 2015 at 7:55 AM, Mark Williamson
> <mwilliamson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> Although I've marked this as a "Regression", we do realise there are
>> legitimate security concerns over the original implementation of this
>> interface.  Still, given the kernel's strong stance on preserving userspace
>> interfaces, we thought we ought to flag this quickly as something that has
>> changed application-relevant behaviour.
>
> So the one exception to the regression rule is "security fixes", but
> even for security fixes we do try to be as reasonable as humanly
> possible to make them not break things.
>
> Now, as you mentioned, one option is to not outright disallow accesses
> to the /proc/PID/pagemap, but to at least hide the page frame numbers.
> However, I don't believe that we have a good enough scrambling model
> to make that reasonable. Remember: any attacker will be able to see
> our scrambling code, so it would need to be both cryptographically
> secure *and* use a truly random per-VM secret key. Quite frankly,
> that's a _lot_ of effort for dubious gain...

Even though I've been accused (correctly?) of suggesting that, I'm not
sure I like it anymore.  Suppose I map some anonymous memory, learn
its (scrambled) pfn, then unmap it and remap a setuid file.  Now I can
tell whether I've mapped the setuid file at the same pfn that was
mapped as my anonymous memory.  IIRC that's sufficient for one of the
variants of Mark's attack.

--Andy
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