The previous commit added macro calls in the entry code which mitigate the
Spectre v1 swapgs issue if the X86_FEATURE_FENCE_SWAPGS_* features are
enabled. Enable those features where applicable.
The mitigations may be disabled with "nospectre_v1" or "mitigations=off".
There are different features which can affect the risk of attack:
- When FSGSBASE is enabled, unprivileged users are able to place any
value in GS, using the wrgsbase instruction. This means they can
write a GS value which points to any value in kernel space, which can
be useful with the following gadget in an interrupt/exception/NMI
handler:
if (coming from user space)
swapgs
mov %gs:<percpu_offset>, %reg1
// dependent load or store based on the value of %reg
// for example: mov %(reg1), %reg2
If an interrupt is coming from user space, and the entry code
speculatively skips the swapgs (due to user branch mistraining), it
may speculatively execute the GS-based load and a subsequent dependent
load or store, exposing the kernel data to an L1 side channel leak.
Note that, on Intel, a similar attack exists in the above gadget when
coming from kernel space, if the swapgs gets speculatively executed to
switch back to the user GS. On AMD, this variant isn't possible
because swapgs is serializing with respect to future GS-based
accesses.
NOTE: The FSGSBASE patch set hasn't been merged yet, so the above case
doesn't exist quite yet.
- When FSGSBASE is disabled, the issue is mitigated somewhat because
unprivileged users must use prctl(ARCH_SET_GS) to set GS, which
restricts GS values to user space addresses only. That means the
gadget would need an additional step, since the target kernel address
needs to be read from user space first. Something like:
if (coming from user space)
swapgs
mov %gs:<percpu_offset>, %reg1
mov (%reg1), %reg2
// dependent load or store based on the value of %reg2
// for example: mov %(reg2), %reg3
It's difficult to audit for this gadget in all the handlers, so while
there are no known instances of it, it's entirely possible that it
exists somewhere (or could be introduced in the future). Without
tooling to analyze all such code paths, consider it vulnerable.
Effects of SMAP on the !FSGSBASE case:
- If SMAP is enabled, and the CPU reports RDCL_NO (i.e., not
susceptible to Meltdown), the kernel is prevented from speculatively
reading user space memory, even L1 cached values. This effectively
disables the !FSGSBASE attack vector.
- If SMAP is enabled, but the CPU *is* susceptible to Meltdown, SMAP
still prevents the kernel from speculatively reading user space
memory. But it does *not* prevent the kernel from reading the
user value from L1, if it has already been cached. This is probably
only a small hurdle for an attacker to overcome.
Thanks to Dave Hansen for contributing the speculative_smap() function.
Thanks to Andrew Cooper for providing the inside scoop on whether swapgs
is serializing on AMD.
[ tglx: Fixed the USER fence decision and polished the comment as suggested
by Dave Hansen ]
Signed-off-by: Josh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Reviewed-by: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com>
a205982598
