On Fri, Dec 02, 2022 at 04:36:04PM -0800, Rick Edgecombe wrote:

From: Yu-cheng Yu <redacted>

Some applications (like GDB) would like to tweak shadow stack state via
ptrace. This allows for existing functionality to continue to work for
seized shadow stack applications. Provide an regset interface for
manipulating the shadow stack pointer (SSP).

There is already ptrace functionality for accessing xstate, but this
does not include supervisor xfeatures. So there is not a completely
clear place for where to put the shadow stack state. Adding it to the
user xfeatures regset would complicate that code, as it currently shares
logic with signals which should not have supervisor features.

Don't add a general supervisor xfeature regset like the user one,
because it is better to maintain flexibility for other supervisor
xfeatures to define their own interface. For example, an xfeature may
decide not to expose all of it's state to userspace, as is actually the
case for  shadow stack ptrace functionality. A lot of enum values remain
to be used, so just put it in dedicated shadow stack regset.

The only downside to not having a generic supervisor xfeature regset,
is that apps need to be enlightened of any new supervisor xfeature
exposed this way (i.e. they can't try to have generic save/restore
logic). But maybe that is a good thing, because they have to think
through each new xfeature instead of encountering issues when new a new
supervisor xfeature was added.

By adding a shadow stack regset, it also has the effect of including the
shadow stack state in a core dump, which could be useful for debugging.

The shadow stack specific xstate includes the SSP, and the shadow stack
and WRSS enablement status. Enabling shadow stack or wrss in the kernel
involves more than just flipping the bit. The kernel is made aware that
it has to do extra things when cloning or handling signals. That logic
is triggered off of separate feature enablement state kept in the task
struct. So the flipping on HW shadow stack enforcement without notifying
the kernel to change its behavior would severely limit what an application
could do without crashing, and the results would depend on kernel
internal implementation details. There is also no known use for controlling
this state via prtace today. So only expose the SSP, which is something
that userspace already has indirect control over.

Tested-by: Pengfei Xu <redacted>
Tested-by: John Allen <john.allen@amd.com>
Co-developed-by: Rick Edgecombe <rick.p.edgecombe@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Rick Edgecombe <rick.p.edgecombe@intel.com>

Reviewed-by: Kees Cook <redacted>

-- 
Kees Cook