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Commit 7a46ec0e authored by Kees Cook's avatar Kees Cook Committed by Ingo Molnar
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locking/refcounts, x86/asm: Implement fast refcount overflow protection

This implements refcount_t overflow protection on x86 without a noticeable
performance impact, though without the fuller checking of REFCOUNT_FULL.

This is done by duplicating the existing atomic_t refcount implementation
but with normally a single instruction added to detect if the refcount
has gone negative (e.g. wrapped past INT_MAX or below zero). When detected,
the handler saturates the refcount_t to INT_MIN / 2. With this overflow
protection, the erroneous reference release that would follow a wrap back
to zero is blocked from happening, avoiding the class of refcount-overflow
use-after-free vulnerabilities entirely.

Only the overflow case of refcounting can be perfectly protected, since
it can be detected and stopped before the reference is freed and left to
be abused by an attacker. There isn't a way to block early decrements,
and while REFCOUNT_FULL stops increment-from-zero cases (which would
be the state _after_ an early ...
parent 907dc16d
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