Re: [PATCH v2 05/12] arm64: Basic Branch Target Identification support

From: Richard Henderson
Date: Fri Oct 11 2019 - 11:25:38 EST


On 10/11/19 11:10 AM, Mark Rutland wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 07:44:33PM +0100, Dave Martin wrote:
>> @@ -730,6 +730,11 @@ static void setup_return
>> regs->regs[29] = (unsigned long)&user->next_frame->fp;
>> regs->pc = (unsigned long)ka->sa.sa_handler;
>>
>> + if (system_supports_bti()) {
>> + regs->pstate &= ~PSR_BTYPE_MASK;
>> + regs->pstate |= PSR_BTYPE_CALL;
>> + }
>> +
>
> I think we might need a comment as to what we're trying to ensure here.
>
> I was under the (perhaps mistaken) impression that we'd generate a
> pristine pstate for a signal handler, and it's not clear to me that we
> must ensure the first instruction is a target instruction.

I think it makes sense to treat entry into a signal handler as a call. Code
that has been compiled for BTI, and whose page has been marked with PROT_BTI,
will already have the pauth/bti markup at the beginning of the signal handler
function; we might as well verify that.

Otherwise sigaction becomes a hole by which an attacker can force execution to
start at any arbitrary address.


r~