On Fri, Sep 11, 2020 at 1:56 AM Kees Cook <keescook@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 10, 2020 at 01:21:07PM -0700, Kees Cook wrote:
> > From: John Wood <john.wood@xxxxxxx>
> >
> > In order to mitigate a fork brute force attack it is necessary to kill
> > all the offending tasks. This tasks are all the ones that share the
> > statistical data with the current task (the task that has crashed).
> >
> > Since the attack detection is done in the function fbfam_handle_attack()
> > that is called every time a core dump is triggered, only is needed to
> > kill the others tasks that share the same statistical data, not the
> > current one as this is in the path to be killed.
[...]
> > + for_each_process(p) {
> > + if (p == current || p->fbfam_stats != stats)
> > + continue;
> > +
> > + do_send_sig_info(SIGKILL, SEND_SIG_PRIV, p, PIDTYPE_PID);
> > + pr_warn("fbfam: Offending process with PID %d killed\n",
> > + p->pid);
[...]
> > +
> > + killed += 1;
> > + if (killed >= to_kill)
> > + break;
> > + }
> > +
> > + rcu_read_unlock();
>
> Can't newly created processes escape this RCU read lock? I think this
> need alternate locking, or something in the task_alloc hook that will
> block any new process from being created within the stats group.
Good point; the proper way to deal with this would probably be to take
the tasklist_lock in read mode around this loop (with
read_lock(&tasklist_lock) / read_unlock(&tasklist_lock)), which pairs
with the write_lock_irq(&tasklist_lock) in copy_process(). Thanks to
the fatal_signal_pending() check while holding the lock in
copy_process(), that would be race-free - any fork() that has not yet
inserted the new task into the global task list would wait for us to
drop the tasklist_lock, then bail out at the fatal_signal_pending()
check.
