Re: [RFC v2 00/27] Kernel Address Space Isolation

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Sun, Jul 14, 2019 at 08:06:12AM -0700, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 12, 2019 at 12:06 PM Peter Zijlstra <peterz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, Jul 12, 2019 at 06:37:47PM +0200, Alexandre Chartre wrote:
> > > On 7/12/19 5:16 PM, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> >
> > > > Right. If we decide to expose more parts of the kernel mappings then that's
> > > > just adding more stuff to the existing user (PTI) map mechanics.
> > >
> > > If we expose more parts of the kernel mapping by adding them to the existing
> > > user (PTI) map, then we only control the mapping of kernel sensitive data but
> > > we don't control user mapping (with ASI, we exclude all user mappings).
> > >
> > > How would you control the mapping of userland sensitive data and exclude them
> > > from the user map? Would you have the application explicitly identify sensitive
> > > data (like Andy suggested with a /dev/xpfo device)?
> >
> > To what purpose do you want to exclude userspace from the kernel
> > mapping; that is, what are you mitigating against with that?
> 
> Mutually distrusting user/guest tenants.  Imagine an attack against a
> VM hosting provider (GCE, for example).  If the overall system is
> well-designed, the host kernel won't possess secrets that are
> important to the overall hosting network.  The interesting secrets are
> in the memory of other tenants running under the same host.  So, if we
> can mostly or completely avoid mapping one tenant's memory in the
> host, we reduce the amount of valuable information that could leak via
> a speculation (or wild read) attack to another tenant.
> 
> The practicality of such a scheme is obviously an open question.

Ah, ok. So it's some virt specific nonsense. I'll go on ignoring it then
;-)