Thread (26 messages) 26 messages, 7 authors, 2020-04-21

Re: [PATCH v2 5/5] arm64: entry: Enable random_kstack_offset support

From: Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@arm.com>
Date: 2020-03-26 11:15:41
Also in: linux-mm, lkml

On Wed, Mar 25, 2020 at 01:22:07PM -0700, Kees Cook wrote:
On Wed, Mar 25, 2020 at 01:21:27PM +0000, Mark Rutland wrote:
quoted
On Tue, Mar 24, 2020 at 01:32:31PM -0700, Kees Cook wrote:
quoted
Allow for a randomized stack offset on a per-syscall basis, with roughly
5 bits of entropy.

Signed-off-by: Kees Cook <redacted>
Just to check, do you have an idea of the impact on arm64? Patch 3 had
figures for x86 where it reads the TSC, and it's unclear to me how
get_random_int() compares to that.
I didn't do a measurement on arm64 since I don't have a good bare-metal
test environment. I know Andy Lutomirki has plans for making
get_random_get() as fast as possible, so that's why I used it here.
Ok. I suspect I also won't get the chance to test that in the next few
days, but if I do I'll try to share the results.

My concern here was that, get_random_int() has to grab a spinlock and
mess with IRQ masking, so has the potential to block for much longer,
but that might not be an issue in practice, and I don't think that
should block these patches.
I couldn't figure out if there was a comparable instruction like rdtsc
in aarch64 (it seems there's a cycle counter, but I found nothing in
the kernel that seemed to actually use it)?
AArch64 doesn't have a direct equivalent. The generic counter
(CNTxCT_EL0) is the closest thing, but its nominal frequency is
typically much lower than the nominal CPU clock frequency (unlike TSC
where they're the same). The cycle counter (PMCCNTR_EL0) is part of the
PMU, and can't be relied on in the same way (e.g. as perf reprograms it
to generate overflow events, and it can stop for things like WFI/WFE).

Thanks,
Mark.

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