Re: [GIT PULL] x86/mm changes for v4.4

[Ingo Molnar]

* Matt Fleming <matt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Fri, 06 Nov, at 07:55:50AM, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> > 
> >  3) We should fix the EFI permission problem without relying on the firmware: it 
> >     appears we could just mark everything R-X optimistically, and if a write fault 
> >     happens (it's pretty rare in fact, only triggers when we write to an EFI 
> >     variable and so), we can mark the faulting page RW- on the fly, because it 
> >     appears that writable EFI sections, while not enumerated very well in 'old' 
> >     firmware, are still supposed to be page granular. (Even 'new' firmware I 
> >     wouldn't automatically trust to get the enumeration right...)
> 
> Sorry, this isn't true. I misled you with one of my earlier posts on
> this topic. Let me try and clear things up...
> 
> Writing to EFI regions has to do with every invocation of the EFI
> runtime services - it's not limited to when you read/write/delete EFI
> variables. In fact, EFI variables really have nothing to do with this
> discussion, they're a completely opaque concept to the OS, we have no
> idea how the firmware implements them. Everything is done via the EFI
> boot/runtime services.
> 
> The firmware itself will attempt to write to EFI regions when we
> invoke the EFI services because that's where the PE/COFF ".data" and
> ".bss" sections live along with the heap. There's even some relocation
> fixups that occur as SetVirtualAddressMap() time so it'll write to
> ".text" too.
> 
> Now, the above PE/COFF sections are usually (always?) contained within
> EFI regions of type EfiRuntimeServicesCode. We know this is true
> because the firmware folks have told us so, and because stopping that
> is the motivation behind the new EFI_PROPERTIES_TABLE feature in UEFI
> V2.5.
> 
> The data sections within the region are also *not* guaranteed to be
> page granular because work was required in Tianocore for emitting
> sections with 4k alignment as part of the EFI_PROPERTIES_TABLE
> support.
> 
> Ultimately, what this means is that if you were to attempt to
> dynamically fixup those regions that required write permission, you'd
> have to modify the mappings for the majority of the EFI regions
> anyway. And if you're blindly allowing write permission as a fixup,
> there's not much security to be had.

I think you misunderstood my suggestion: the 'fixup' would be changing it from R-X 
to RW-, i.e. it would add 'write' permission but remove 'execute' permission.

Note that there would be no 'RWX' permission at any given moment - which is the 
dangerous combination.

> >     If that 'supposed to be' turns out to be 'not true' (not unheard of in
> >     firmware land), then plan B would be to mark pages that generate write faults 
> >     RWX as well, to not break functionality. (This 'mark it RWX' is not something 
> >     that exploits would have easy access to, and we could also generate a warning
> >     [after the EFI call has finished] if it ever triggers.)
> > 
> >     Admittedly this approach might not be without its own complications, but it 
> >     looks reasonably simple (I don't think we need per EFI call page tables, 
> >     etc.), and does not assume much about the firmware being able to enumerate its 
> >     permissions properly. Were we to merge EFI support today I'd have insisted on 
> >     trying such an approach from day 1 on.
> 
> We already have separate EFI page tables, though with the caveat that
> we share some of swapper_pg_dir's PGD entries. The best solution would
> be to stop sharing entries and isolate the EFI mappings from every
> other page table structure, so that they're only used during the EFI
> service calls.

Absolutely. Can you try to fix this for v4.3?

Thanks,

	Ingo
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