Re: [PATCH v23 00/28] Control-flow Enforcement: Shadow Stack

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Wed, Mar 17, 2021 at 10:18:00AM +0100, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> 
> * Yu, Yu-cheng <yu-cheng.yu@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > On 3/16/2021 2:15 PM, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > > On Tue, Mar 16, 2021 at 08:10:26AM -0700, Yu-cheng Yu wrote:
> > > > Control-flow Enforcement (CET) is a new Intel processor feature that blocks
> > > > return/jump-oriented programming attacks.  Details are in "Intel 64 and
> > > > IA-32 Architectures Software Developer's Manual" [1].
> > > > 
> > > > CET can protect applications and the kernel.  This series enables only
> > > > application-level protection, and has three parts:
> > > > 
> > > >    - Shadow stack [2],
> > > >    - Indirect branch tracking [3], and
> > > >    - Selftests [4].
> > > 
> > > CET is marketing; afaict SS and IBT are 100% independent and there's no
> > > reason what so ever to have them share any code, let alone a Kconfig
> > > knob.
> > 
> > We used to have shadow stack and ibt under separate Kconfig options, but in
> > a few places they actually share same code path, such as the XSAVES
> > supervisor states and ELF header for example.  Anyways I will be happy to
> > make changes again if there is agreement.
> 
> I was look at:
> 
>   x86/fpu/xstate: Introduce CET MSR and XSAVES supervisor states
> 
> didn't see any IBT logic - it's essentially all shadow stack state.
> 
> Which is not surprising, forward call edge integrity protection (IBT) 
> requires very little state, does it?

They hid the IBT enable bit in the U_CET MSR, which is in the XSAVE
thing.