Re: [PATCH] security: keys: Use kvfree_sensitive in a few places
From: James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>
Date: 2020-09-11 16:57:53
Also in:
keyrings, lkml
From: James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>
Date: 2020-09-11 16:57:53
Also in:
keyrings, lkml
On Fri, 2020-09-11 at 12:44 +0100, Alex Dewar wrote:
In big_key.c, there are a few places where memzero_explicit + kvfree is used. It is better to use kvfree_sensitive instead, which is more readable and also prevents the compiler from eliding the call to memzero_explicit. Fix this.
That last bit is untrue: the compiler can't elide memzero_explicit ... that's why it has the explicit suffix. The original problem was a lot of people do memset(.., 0, ..); kfree() which the compiler can elide if it understands the memory is going out of scope. Or the even more problematic memset(..., 0, ...) on a stack variable before it goes out of scope. We can argue about readability but there's no secret leak here. James