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Commit e4f4db47 authored by Luis Gerhorst's avatar Luis Gerhorst Committed by Daniel Borkmann
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bpf: Fix pointer-leak due to insufficient speculative store bypass mitigation

To mitigate Spectre v4, 2039f26f ("bpf: Fix leakage due to
insufficient speculative store bypass mitigation") inserts lfence
instructions after 1) initializing a stack slot and 2) spilling a
pointer to the stack.

However, this does not cover cases where a stack slot is first
initialized with a pointer (subject to sanitization) but then
overwritten with a scalar (not subject to sanitization because
the slot was already initialized). In this case, the second write
may be subject to speculative store bypass (SSB) creating a
speculative pointer-as-scalar type confusion. This allows the
program to subsequently leak the numerical pointer value using,
for example, a branch-based cache side channel.

To fix this, also sanitize scalars if they write a stack slot
that previously contained a pointer. Assuming that pointer-spills
are only generated by LLVM on register-pressure, the performance
impact on most real-world BPF programs should be small.

The following unprivileged BPF bytecode drafts a minimal exploit
and the mitigation:

  [...]
  // r6 = 0 or 1 (skalar, unknown user input)
  // r7 = accessible ptr for side channel
  // r10 = frame pointer (fp), to be leaked
  //
  r9 = r10 # fp alias to encourage ssb
  *(u64 *)(r9 - 8) = r10 // fp[-8] = ptr, to be leaked
  // lfence added here because of pointer spill to stack.
  //
  // Ommitted: Dummy bpf_ringbuf_output() here to train alias predictor
  // for no r9-r10 dependency.
  //
  *(u64 *)(r10 - 8) = r6 // fp[-8] = scalar, overwrites ptr
  // 2039f26f: no lfence added because stack slot was not STACK_INVALID,
  // store may be subject to SSB
  //
  // fix: also add an lfence when the slot contained a ptr
  //
  r8 = *(u64 *)(r9 - 8)
  // r8 = architecturally a scalar, speculatively a ptr
  //
  // leak ptr using branch-based cache side channel:
  r8 &= 1 // choose bit to leak
  if r8 == 0 goto SLOW // no mispredict
  // architecturally dead code if input r6 is 0,
  // only executes speculatively iff ptr bit is 1
  r8 = *(u64 *)(r7 + 0) # encode bit in cache (0: slow, 1: fast)
SLOW:
  [...]

After running this, the program can time the access to *(r7 + 0) to
determine whether the chosen pointer bit was 0 or 1. Repeat this 64
times to recover the whole address on amd64.

In summary, sanitization can only be skipped if one scalar is
overwritten with another scalar. Scalar-confusion due to speculative
store bypass can not lead to invalid accesses because the pointer
bounds deducted during verification are enforced using branchless
logic. See 979d63d5 ("bpf: prevent out of bounds speculation on
pointer arithmetic") for details.

Do not make the mitigation depend on !env->allow_{uninit_stack,ptr_leaks}
because speculative leaks are likely unexpected if these were enabled.
For example, leaking the address to a protected log file may be acceptable
while disabling the mitigation might unintentionally leak the address
into the cached-state of a map that is accessible to unprivileged
processes.

Fixes: 2039f26f

 ("bpf: Fix leakage due to insufficient speculative store bypass mitigation")
Signed-off-by: default avatarLuis Gerhorst <gerhorst@cs.fau.de>
Signed-off-by: default avatarDaniel Borkmann <daniel@iogearbox.net>
Acked-by: default avatarHenriette Hofmeier <henriette.hofmeier@rub.de>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/edc95bad-aada-9cfc-ffe2-fa9bb206583c@cs.fau.de
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/20230109150544.41465-1-gerhorst@cs.fau.de
parent 9f907439
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