Re: [PATCH V2] mm: Allow userland to request that the kernel clear memory on release

On Fri, Apr 26, 2019 at 7:31 AM Michal Hocko [off-list ref] wrote:

On Thu 25-04-19 14:42:52, Jann Horn wrote:

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On Thu, Apr 25, 2019 at 2:14 PM Michal Hocko [off-list ref] wrote:
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On Wed 24-04-19 14:10:39, Matthew Garrett wrote:

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From: Matthew Garrett <redacted>

Applications that hold secrets and wish to avoid them leaking can use
mlock() to prevent the page from being pushed out to swap and
MADV_DONTDUMP to prevent it from being included in core dumps. Applications
can also use atexit() handlers to overwrite secrets on application exit.
However, if an attacker can reboot the system into another OS, they can
dump the contents of RAM and extract secrets. We can avoid this by setting
CONFIG_RESET_ATTACK_MITIGATION on UEFI systems in order to request that the
firmware wipe the contents of RAM before booting another OS, but this means
rebooting takes a *long* time - the expected behaviour is for a clean
shutdown to remove the request after scrubbing secrets from RAM in order to
avoid this.

Unfortunately, if an application exits uncleanly, its secrets may still be
present in RAM. This can't be easily fixed in userland (eg, if the OOM
killer decides to kill a process holding secrets, we're not going to be able
to avoid that), so this patch adds a new flag to madvise() to allow userland
to request that the kernel clear the covered pages whenever the page
reference count hits zero. Since vm_flags is already full on 32-bit, it
will only work on 64-bit systems.

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diff --git a/mm/madvise.c b/mm/madvise.c
index 21a7881a2db4..989c2fde15cf 100644
--- a/mm/madvise.c
+++ b/mm/madvise.c

@@ -92,6 +92,22 @@ static long madvise_behavior(struct vm_area_struct *vma,
      case MADV_KEEPONFORK:
              new_flags &= ~VM_WIPEONFORK;
              break;
+     case MADV_WIPEONRELEASE:
+             /* MADV_WIPEONRELEASE is only supported on anonymous memory. */
+             if (VM_WIPEONRELEASE == 0 || vma->vm_file ||
+                 vma->vm_flags & VM_SHARED) {
+                     error = -EINVAL;
+                     goto out;
+             }
+             new_flags |= VM_WIPEONRELEASE;
+             break;

An interesting effect of this is that it will be possible to set this
on a CoW anon VMA in a fork() child, and then the semantics in the
parent will be subtly different - e.g. if the parent vmsplice()d a
CoWed page into a pipe, then forked an unprivileged child, the child

Maybe a stupid question. How do you fork an unprivileged child (without
exec)? Child would have to drop priviledges on its own, no?

Sorry, yes, that's what I meant.