Re: [PATCH v4 00/17] khwasan: kernel hardware assisted address sanitizer

[Andrey Konovalov]

On Thu, Jun 28, 2018 at 12:51 PM, Dave Martin <Dave.Martin@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 26, 2018 at 03:15:10PM +0200, Andrey Konovalov wrote:
>> 1. By using the Top Byte Ignore arm64 CPU feature, we can store pointer
>>    tags in the top byte of each kernel pointer.
>
> [...]
>
> This is a change from the current situation, so the kernel may be
> making implicit assumptions about the top byte of kernel addresses.
>
> Randomising the top bits may cause things like address conversions and
> pointer arithmetic to break.
>
> For example, (q - p) will not produce the expected result if q and p
> have different tags.

If q and p have different tags, that means they come from different
allocations. I don't think it would make sense to calculate pointer
difference in this case.

>
> Conversions, such as between pointer and pfn, may also go wrong if not
> appropriately masked.
>
> There are also potential pointer comparison and aliasing issues if
> the tag bits are ever stripped or modified.
>
>
> What was your approach to tracking down all the points in the code
> where we have a potential issue?

I've been fuzzing the kernel built with KWHASAN with syzkaller. This
gives a decent coverage and I was able to find some places where
fixups were required this way. Right now the fuzzer is running without
issues. It doesn't prove that all such places are fixed, but I don't
know a better way to test this.