Re: [RFC PATCH v3 12/24] x86/mm: Modify ptep_set_wrprotect and pmdp_set_wrprotect for _PAGE_DIRTY_SW

On Thu, 2018-08-30 at 10:19 -0700, Dave Hansen wrote:

On 08/30/2018 09:23 AM, Jann Horn wrote:

quoted

Three threads (A, B, C) run with the same CR3.

1. a dirty+writable PTE is placed directly in front of B's shadow
stack.
   (this can happen, right? or is there a guard page?)
2. C's TLB caches the dirty+writable PTE.
3. A performs some syscall that triggers ptep_set_wrprotect().
4. A's syscall calls clear_bit().
5. B's TLB caches the transient shadow stack.
[now C has write access to B's transiently-extended shadow stack]
6. B recurses into the transiently-extended shadow stack
7. C overwrites the transiently-extended shadow stack area.
8. B returns through the transiently-extended shadow stack, giving
    the attacker instruction pointer control in B.
9. A's syscall broadcasts a TLB flush.

Heh, that's a good point.  The shadow stack permissions are *not*
strictly reduced because a page getting marked as shadow-stack has
*increased* permissions when being used as a shadow stack.  Fun.

For general hardening, it seems like we want to ensure that there's
a
guard page at the bottom of the shadow stack.  Yu-cheng, do we have
a
guard page?

We don't have the guard page now, but there is a shadow stack token
there, which cannot be used as a return address.

Yu-cheng