On 2024-08-01 13:06, Mark Brown wrote:
The arm64 Guarded Control Stack (GCS) feature provides support for hardware protected stacks of return addresses, intended to provide hardening against return oriented programming (ROP) attacks and to make it easier to gather call stacks for applications such as profiling.
When GCS is active a secondary stack called the Guarded Control Stack is maintained, protected with a memory attribute which means that it can only be written with specific GCS operations. The current GCS pointer can not be directly written to by userspace. When a BL is executed the value stored in LR is also pushed onto the GCS, and when a RET is executed the top of the GCS is popped and compared to LR with a fault being raised if the values do not match. GCS operations may only be performed on GCS pages, a data abort is generated if they are not.
The combination of hardware enforcement and lack of extra instructions in the function entry and exit paths should result in something which has less overhead and is more difficult to attack than a purely software implementation like clang's shadow stacks.
This series implements support for use of GCS by userspace, along with support for use of GCS within KVM guests. It does not enable use of GCS by either EL1 or EL2, this will be implemented separately. Executables are started without GCS and must use a prctl() to enable it, it is expected that this will be done very early in application execution by the dynamic linker or other startup code. For dynamic linking this will be done by checking that everything in the executable is marked as GCS compatible.
x86 has an equivalent feature called shadow stacks, this series depends on the x86 patches for generic memory management support for the new guarded/shadow stack page type and shares APIs as much as possible. As there has been extensive discussion with the wider community around the ABI for shadow stacks I have as far as practical kept implementation decisions close to those for x86, anticipating that review would lead to similar conclusions in the absence of strong reasoning for divergence.
The main divergence I am concious of is that x86 allows shadow stack to be enabled and disabled repeatedly, freeing the shadow stack for the thread whenever disabled, while this implementation keeps the GCS allocated after disable but refuses to reenable it. This is to avoid races with things actively walking the GCS during a disable, we do anticipate that some systems will wish to disable GCS at runtime but are not aware of any demand for subsequently reenabling it.
x86 uses an arch_prctl() to manage enable and disable, since only x86 and S/390 use arch_prctl() a generic prctl() was proposed[1] as part of a patch set for the equivalent RISC-V Zicfiss feature which I initially adopted fairly directly but following review feedback has been revised quite a bit.
We currently maintain the x86 pattern of implicitly allocating a shadow stack for threads started with shadow stack enabled, there has been some discussion of removing this support and requiring the use of clone3() with explicit allocation of shadow stacks instead. I have no strong feelings either way, implicit allocation is not really consistent with anything else we do and creates the potential for errors around thread exit but on the other hand it is existing ABI on x86 and minimises the changes needed in userspace code.
glibc and bionic changes using this ABI have been implemented and tested. Headless Android systems have been validated and Ross Burton has used this code has been used to bring up a Yocto system with GCS enabed as standard, a test implementation of V8 support has also been done.
There is an open issue with support for CRIU, on x86 this required the ability to set the GCS mode via ptrace. This series supports configuring mode bits other than enable/disable via ptrace but it needs to be confirmed if this is sufficient.
The series depends on support for shadow stacks in clone3(), that series includes the addition of ARCH_HAS_USER_SHADOW_STACK.
https://lore.kernel.org/r/20240731-clone3-shadow-stack-v7-0-a9532eebfb1d@ker...
Verified this patchset on a FVP.
Tested-by: Linux Kernel Functional Testing lkft@linaro.org
Cheers, Anders