Re: [PATCH 1/2] mm/mprotect: Call arch_validate_prot under mmap_lock and with length

[Catalin Marinas]

On Mon, Oct 12, 2020 at 11:03:33AM -0600, Khalid Aziz wrote:
> On 10/10/20 5:09 AM, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 07, 2020 at 02:14:09PM -0600, Khalid Aziz wrote:
> >> On 10/7/20 1:39 AM, Jann Horn wrote:
> >>> arch_validate_prot() is a hook that can validate whether a given set of
> >>> protection flags is valid in an mprotect() operation. It is given the set
> >>> of protection flags and the address being modified.
> >>>
> >>> However, the address being modified can currently not actually be used in
> >>> a meaningful way because:
> >>>
> >>> 1. Only the address is given, but not the length, and the operation can
> >>>    span multiple VMAs. Therefore, the callee can't actually tell which
> >>>    virtual address range, or which VMAs, are being targeted.
> >>> 2. The mmap_lock is not held, meaning that if the callee were to check
> >>>    the VMA at @addr, that VMA would be unrelated to the one the
> >>>    operation is performed on.
> >>>
> >>> Currently, custom arch_validate_prot() handlers are defined by
> >>> arm64, powerpc and sparc.
> >>> arm64 and powerpc don't care about the address range, they just check the
> >>> flags against CPU support masks.
> >>> sparc's arch_validate_prot() attempts to look at the VMA, but doesn't take
> >>> the mmap_lock.
> >>>
> >>> Change the function signature to also take a length, and move the
> >>> arch_validate_prot() call in mm/mprotect.c down into the locked region.
> > [...]
> >> As Chris pointed out, the call to arch_validate_prot() from do_mmap2()
> >> is made without holding mmap_lock. Lock is not acquired until
> >> vm_mmap_pgoff(). This variance is uncomfortable but I am more
> >> uncomfortable forcing all implementations of validate_prot to require
> >> mmap_lock be held when non-sparc implementations do not have such need
> >> yet. Since do_mmap2() is in powerpc specific code, for now this patch
> >> solves a current problem.
> > 
> > I still think sparc should avoid walking the vmas in
> > arch_validate_prot(). The core code already has the vmas, though not
> > when calling arch_validate_prot(). That's one of the reasons I added
> > arch_validate_flags() with the MTE patches. For sparc, this could be
> > (untested, just copied the arch_validate_prot() code):
> 
> I am little uncomfortable with the idea of validating protection bits
> inside the VMA walk loop in do_mprotect_pkey(). When ADI is being
> enabled across multiple VMAs and arch_validate_flags() fails on a VMA
> later, do_mprotect_pkey() will bail out with error leaving ADI enabled
> on earlier VMAs. This will apply to protection bits other than ADI as
> well of course. This becomes a partial failure of mprotect() call. I
> think it should be all or nothing with mprotect() - when one calls
> mprotect() from userspace, either the entire address range passed in
> gets its protection bits updated or none of it does. That requires
> validating protection bits upfront or undoing what earlier iterations of
> VMA walk loop might have done.

I thought the same initially but mprotect() already does this with the
VM_MAY* flag checking. If you ask it for an mprotect() that crosses
multiple vmas and one of them fails, it doesn't roll back the changes to
the prior ones. I considered that a similar approach is fine for MTE
(it's most likely a user error).

-- 
Catalin