Re: [RFC PATCH 0/4] Allow tasks to have their user stack pointer sanity checked

[Kees Cook]

On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 9:59 AM Will Deacon <will.deacon@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I attended an interesting talk at LCA last month that described some of the
> security features deployed in OpenBSD [1]. One hardening feature that piqued
> my interest was, on syscall entry and page faults from userspace, checking
> that the user stack pointer for a task points at pages that were either
> allocated by the kernel for the initial process stack of mapped with mmap()
> using the MAP_STACK flag. This acts as a basic defense against stack
> pivoting attacks.

I think this is nice to have, yes! Thanks for working on it. It seems
like this blocks pivots to heap -- relocating to a groomed stack area
would still be allowed. Regardless, this does narrow the scope of such
attacks quite nicely.

> The problem with this checking is that it is a retrospective tightening
> of the ABI, but that hasn't stopped me hacking it together behind a couple
> of prctl() options.

MAP_STACK has been around for a long time, so I think anything using
threads via glibc should be "covered". I would assume this would mean
that glibc could set the prctl() for such users. I suspect there are a
lot of open-coded threading implementations, though. It'd be
interesting to see how many need modification.

Given that this is behind a prctl(), it seems the CONFIG isn't needed?

> Anyway, it was fun to implement so I figured I'd post it as an RFC.

Thanks! I'd love to see an x86 counterpart to the sycall check too.

Did you trying bringing up a full userspace and windowing environment
with this enabled by default (i.e. forcing init to set the prctls)?
I'd be curious to see how much (if anything) goes boom. :)

Reviewed-by: Kees Cook <keescook@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

-Kees

>
> Will
>
> [1] https://2019.linux.conf.au/schedule/presentation/164/
>
> Cc: Kees Cook <keescook@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: Jann Horn <jannh@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: Matthew Wilcox <willy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx>
> Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>
> --->8
>
> Will Deacon (4):
>   mm: Check user stack pointer is mapped with MAP_STACK
>   mm: Expose user stack pointer checking via prctl()
>   mm: Add kconfig entries for user stack pointer checking
>   arm64: Check user stack pointer on syscall entry
>
>  arch/arm64/Kconfig          |  1 +
>  arch/arm64/kernel/syscall.c |  4 +++
>  include/linux/mm.h          | 15 +++++++++-
>  include/linux/mman.h        |  3 +-
>  include/linux/sched.h       |  4 +++
>  include/uapi/linux/prctl.h  |  5 ++++
>  kernel/sys.c                |  5 ++++
>  mm/Kconfig                  | 17 ++++++++++++
>  mm/memory.c                 | 67 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>  9 files changed, 119 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
>
> --
> 2.11.0
>


-- 
Kees Cook