Re: Designated initializers, struct randomization and addressing?

From: Julia Lawall
Date: Wed Jan 04 2017 - 01:27:13 EST




On Tue, 3 Jan 2017, Kees Cook wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 20, 2016 at 9:29 AM, Joe Perches <joe@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Fri, 2016-12-16 at 17:00 -0800, Kees Cook wrote:
> >> Prepare to mark sensitive kernel structures for randomization by making
> > sure they're using designated initializers.
> >
> > About the designated initializer patches,
> > which by themselves are fine of course,
> > and the fundamental randomization plugin,
> > c guarantees that struct member ordering
> > is as specified.
> >
> > how is the code to be verified so that
> > any use of things like offsetof and any
> > address/indexing is not impacted?
>
> AIUI, offsetof() works correctly in the face of this plugin, since the
> ordering happens before the pass that handles offsetof(). Anything
> that _does not_ use offsetof(), however, needs fixing. Based on the
> work done in grsecurity, I don't see any added offsetof() uses that
> are specific to the randomization plugin.
>
> (Note that the randomization plugin is only on function pointer
> structures, where using an offsetof() should be rare to none, and on
> hand-selected structures, where missing offsetof() should be easy to
> audit.)

What is the precise definition of "function pointer structures"? Only
function pointers? At least one function pointer?

thanks,
julia