The STACKLEAK feature (initially developed by PaX Team) has the following
benefits:
1. Reduces the information that can be revealed through kernel stack leak
bugs. The idea of erasing the thread stack at the end of syscalls is
similar to CONFIG_PAGE_POISONING and memzero_explicit() in kernel
crypto, which all comply with FDP_RIP.2 (Full Residual Information
Protection) of the Common Criteria standard.
2. Blocks some uninitialized stack variable attacks (e.g. CVE-2017-17712,
CVE-2010-2963). That kind of bugs should be killed by improving C
compilers in future, which might take a long time.
This commit introduces the code filling the used part of the kernel
stack with a poison value before returning to userspace. Full
STACKLEAK feature also contains the gcc plugin which comes in a
separate commit.
The STACKLEAK feature is ported from grsecurity/PaX. More information at:
https://grsecurity.net/https://pax.grsecurity.net/
This code is modified from Brad Spengler/PaX Team's code in the last
public patch of grsecurity/PaX based on our understanding of the code.
Changes or omissions from the original code are ours and don't reflect
the original grsecurity/PaX code.
Performance impact:
Hardware: Intel Core i7-4770, 16 GB RAM
Test #1: building the Linux kernel on a single core
0.91% slowdown
Test #2: hackbench -s 4096 -l 2000 -g 15 -f 25 -P
4.2% slowdown
So the STACKLEAK description in Kconfig includes: "The tradeoff is the
performance impact: on a single CPU system kernel compilation sees a 1%
slowdown, other systems and workloads may vary and you are advised to
test this feature on your expected workload before deploying it".
Signed-off-by: Alexander Popov <alex.popov@linux.com>
Acked-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Reviewed-by: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com>
Acked-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
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