On Tue, Nov 13, 2018 at 10:17 AM, Kristina Martsenko
[off-list ref] wrote:

When the PAC authentication fails, it doesn't actually generate an
exception, it just flips a bit in the high-order bits of the pointer,
making the pointer invalid. Then when the pointer is dereferenced (e.g.
as a function return address), it generates the usual type of exception
for an invalid address.

Ah! Okay, thanks. I missed that detail. :)

What area of memory ends up being addressable with such bit flips?
(i.e. is the kernel making sure nothing executable ends up there?)

So when a function return fails in user mode, the exception is handled
in __do_user_fault and a forced SIGSEGV is delivered to the task. When a
function return fails in kernel mode, the exception is handled in
__do_kernel_fault and the task is killed.

This is different from stack protector as we don't panic the kernel, we
just kill the task. It would be difficult to panic as we don't have a
reliable way of knowing that the exception was caused by a PAC
authentication failure (we just have an invalid pointer with a specific
bit flipped). We also don't print out any PAC-related warning.

There are other "guesses" in __do_kernel_fault(), I think? Could a
"PAC mismatch?" warning be included in the Oops if execution fails in
the address range that PAC failures would resolve into?

-Kees

-- 
Kees Cook