Re: [PATCH 6/9] x86, pkeys: add pkey set/get syscalls

On Jul 11, 2016 8:48 AM, "Dave Hansen" [off-list ref] wrote:

On 07/11/2016 07:45 AM, Andy Lutomirski wrote:

quoted

On Mon, Jul 11, 2016 at 7:34 AM, Dave Hansen [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Should we instead just recommend to userspace that they lock down access
to keys by default in all threads as a best practice?

Is that really better than doing it in-kernel?  My concern is that
we'll find library code that creates a thread, and that code could run
before the pkey-aware part of the program even starts running.

Yeah, so let's assume we have some pkey-unaware thread.  The upside of a
scheme where the kernel preemptively (and transparently to the thread)
locks down PKRU is that the thread can't go corrupting any non-zero-pkey
structures that came from other threads.

But, the downside is that the thread can not access any non-zero-pkey
structures without taking some kind of action with PKRU.  That obviously
won't happen since the thread is pkeys-unaware to begin with.  Would
that break these libraries unless everything using pkeys knows to only
share pkey=0 data with those threads?

Yes, but at least for the cases I can think of, that's probably a good
thing.  OTOH, I can see cases where you want everyone to be able to
read but only specific code paths to be able to write.

I think it's more or less impossible to get sensible behavior passing
pkey != 0 data to legacy functions.  If you call:

void frob(struct foo *p);

If frob in turn passes p to a thread, what PKRU is it supposed to use?

quoted

So how is user code supposed lock down all of its threads?

seccomp has TSYNC for this, but I don't think that PKRU allows
something like that.

I'm not sure this is possible for PKRU.  Think of a simple PKRU
manipulation in userspace:

        pkru = rdpkru();
        pkru |= PKEY_DENY_ACCESS<<key*2;
        wrpkru(pkru);

If we push a PKRU value into a thread between the rdpkru() and wrpkru(),
we'll lose the content of that "push".  I'm not sure there's any way to
guarantee this with a user-controlled register.

We could try to insist that user code uses some vsyscall helper that
tracks which bits are as-yet-unassigned.  That's quite messy, though.

We could also arbitrarily partition the key space into
initially-wide-open, initially-read-only, and initially-no-access and
let pkey_alloc say which kind it wants.

--Andy