Re: [PATCH] x86/pkeys: Explicitly treat PK #PF on kernel address as a bad area

[Andy Lutomirski]

On Tue, Sep 4, 2018 at 2:21 PM, Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 09/04/2018 12:56 PM, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
>> I have no objection to this patch.
>>
>> Dave, why did you think that we could get a PK fault on the vsyscall
>> page, even on kernels that still marked it executable?  Sure, you
>> could get an instruction in the vsyscall page to get a PK fault, but
>> CR2 wouldn't point to the vsyscall page, right?
>
> I'm inferring the CR2 value from the page fault trace point.  I see
> entries like this:
>
>  protection_keys-4313  [002] d... 420257.094541: page_fault_user:
> address=_end ip=_end error_code=0x15
>
> But, that's not a PK fault, and it triggers the "misaligned vsyscall
> (exploit attempt or buggy program)" stuff in dmesg.  It's just the
> symptom of trying to execute the non-executable vsyscall page.
>
> I'm not a super big fan of this particular patch, though.  The
> fault_in_kernel_space() check is really presuming two things:
> 1. pkey faults (PF_PK=1) only occur on user pages (_PAGE_USER=1)
> 2. fault_in_kernel_space()==1 addresses are never user pages
>
> #1 is a hardware expectation.  We *can* look for that directly by just
> making sure that X86_PF_PK is only set when it also comes with
> X86_PF_USER in the hardware page fault error code.
>
> (...
>         Aside: We should probably explicitly separate out the hardware
>         error code from the software-munged version, like we do here:
>         >         if (user_mode(regs)) {
>         >                 local_irq_enable();
>         >                 error_code |= X86_PF_USER)
>
> But, #2 is a bit of a more loose check.  It wasn't true for the recent
> vsyscall, and I've also seen goofy drivers map memory out to userspace
> quite a few times in the kernel address space.
>
> So, I'd much rather see a X86_PF_USER check than a X86_PF_USER check.
>
> But, as for pkeys...
>
> The original intent here was to relay: "protection key faults can never
> be spurious".  The reason in my silly comment was that we don't do lazy
> flushing, but that's imprecise: the real reasoning is that we don't ever
> have kernel pages on which we can take protection key faults.
>
> IOW, I think the check here should be for "protection key faults only
> occur on user pages", and all the *spurious* checking should be looking
> at *just* user vs. kernel pages, like:
>
> static int spurious_fault_check(unsigned long error_code, pte_t *pte)
> {
>         /* Only expect spurious faults on kernel pages: */
>         WARN_ON_ONCE(pte_flags(*pte) & _PAGE_USER);
>         /* Only expect spurious faults originating from kernel code: */
>         WARN_ON_ONCE(error_code & X86_PF_USER);
>         ...
>

Want to just send an alternative patch?

Also, I doubt it matters right here, but !X86_PF_USER isn't quite the
same thing as "originating from kernel code" -- it can also be user
code that does a CPL0 access due to exception delivery or access to a
descriptor table.  Which you saw plenty of times while debugging
PTI... :)  I doubt any of those should be spurious, though.

--Andy