The STACKLEAK feature (initially developed by PaX Team) has the following
benefits:
1. Reduces the information that can be revealed through kernel stack leak
bugs. The idea of erasing the thread stack at the end of syscalls is
similar to CONFIG_PAGE_POISONING and memzero_explicit() in kernel
crypto, which all comply with FDP_RIP.2 (Full Residual Information
Protection) of the Common Criteria standard.
2. Blocks some uninitialized stack variable attacks (e.g. CVE-2017-17712,
CVE-2010-2963). That kind of bugs should be killed by improving C
compilers in future, which might take a long time.
This commit introduces the code filling the used part of the kernel
stack with a poison value before returning to userspace. Full
STACKLEAK feature also contains the gcc plugin which comes in a
separate commit.
The STACKLEAK feature is ported from grsecurity/PaX. More information at:
https://grsecurity.net/https://pax.grsecurity.net/
This code is modified from Brad Spengler/PaX Team's code in the last
public patch of grsecurity/PaX based on our understanding of the code.
Changes or omissions from the original code are ours and don't reflect
the original grsecurity/PaX code.
Performance impact:
Hardware: Intel Core i7-4770, 16 GB RAM
Test #1: building the Linux kernel on a single core
0.91% slowdown
Test #2: hackbench -s 4096 -l 2000 -g 15 -f 25 -P
4.2% slowdown
So the STACKLEAK description in Kconfig includes: "The tradeoff is the
performance impact: on a single CPU system kernel compilation sees a 1%
slowdown, other systems and workloads may vary and you are advised to
test this feature on your expected workload before deploying it".
Signed-off-by: Alexander Popov <alex.popov@linux.com>
Acked-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Reviewed-by: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com>
Acked-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Prior to doing compiler feature detection in Kconfig, attempts to build
GCC plugins with Clang would fail the build, much in the same way missing
GCC plugin headers would fail the build. However, now that this logic
has been lifted into Kconfig, add an explicit test for GCC (instead of
duplicating it in the feature-test script).
Reported-by: Stefan Agner <stefan@agner.ch>
Signed-off-by: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Reviewed-by: Masahiro Yamada <yamada.masahiro@socionext.com>
