Re: [x86] copy_from{to}_user question

From	"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>
Newsgroups	linux.kernel
Subject	Re: [x86] copy_from{to}_user question
Date	2015-08-21 23:10 +0200
Message-ID	<q01Jx-6TC-25@gated-at.bofh.it> (permalink)
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On 08/20/2015 09:35 PM, Borislav Petkov wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 11:22:43AM -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>> There is a valid reason to do this, which is that currently
>> copy_{to,from}_user() effectively bypass SMAP as they don't verify that
>> the kernel pointer is actually a kernel pointer.
> 
> Well, we do STAC before we copy but SMAP is checking for supervisor
> access to *user* data. But you say "kernel pointers" which is supervisor
> data. What am I missing?
> 

What I'm saying is that we do do STAC, which *disables* SMAP.  We have
to do that because one pointer is known to be a user space pointer.

However, we currently don't verify that the *other* pointer is kernel
space, which it is supposed to be (if not, we should be using
copy_in_user).  We have to do this manually since we have to STAC which
means SMAP doesn't do anything at all.  I believe it would be a good
idea to add such checks (and they would even benefit non-SMAP hardware.)

	-hpa

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Thread

Re: [x86] copy_from{to}_user question "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com> - 2015-08-20 20:30 +0200
  Re: [x86] copy_from{to}_user question Borislav Petkov <bp@suse.de> - 2015-08-21 06:40 +0200
    Re: [x86] copy_from{to}_user question "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com> - 2015-08-21 23:10 +0200
      Re: [x86] copy_from{to}_user question Borislav Petkov <bp@suse.de> - 2015-08-22 11:10 +0200
        Re: [x86] copy_from{to}_user question yalin wang <yalin.wang2010@gmail.com> - 2015-08-24 10:00 +0200
          Re: [x86] copy_from{to}_user question Jeff Epler <jepler@unpythonic.net> - 2015-08-24 14:10 +0200

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