Thread (8 messages) 8 messages, 4 authors, 2020-09-14

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

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
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