Re: [PATCH v2] mm: Enable suspend-only swap spaces

[Pavel Machek]

Hi!

> > > If I have
> > > different security designs for swap space and hibernate, then even a
> > > chance of some swap leaking into this region is a problem.
> >
> > Could you expand some more about the this part please?
> 
> Offline attacks (ie manipulating storage from underneath the machine)
> are a major concern when enabling both swap and hibernate. But the
> approach of adding integrity to mitigate offline attacks may differ
> between swap and hibernate in the interest of performance. Swap for
> instance essentially needs a per-page dictionary of hashes for
> integrity, since pages can be added and removed arbitrarily. Hibernate
> however just needs a single hash across the entire image to provide
> integrity. If you have swap leaking onto a region where you don't have
> integrity enabled (because say you handled integrity at the image
> level for hibernate, and at the block layer for swap), your swap
> integrity story is compromised.

If you want to encrypt/sign the hibernation, you likely should use
uswsusp, and that means you can store hibernation image where (and
how) you want it, without modifying kernel.

See kernel/power/user.c .

> I don't think this digs the design hole deeper. Yes, the ship on this
> design has long ago sailed. But if we ever did try to dig ourselves
> out of the swap/hibernate hole by providing new APIs to handle them
> separately, this flag would serve as a good cutover to divert out of
> the swap code and into the new shiny hibernate-only code. The APIs are
> never going to be totally disentangled, so a clean cutover opportunity
> is the best one can hope for.

Is uswsusp the place that should provide clean cutover?

Anyway, I acked the patch before, but it looks like it was
mistake. I withdraw the ack.

Best regards,
								Pavel

-- 
http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek

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