On 07/29/2016 06:30 PM, Dave Hansen wrote:
From: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> PKRU is the register that lets you disallow writes or all access to a given protection key. The XSAVE hardware defines an "init state" of 0 for PKRU: its most permissive state, allowing access/writes to everything. Since we start off all new processes with the init state, we start all processes off with the most permissive possible PKRU. This is unfortunate. If a thread is clone()'d [1] before a program has time to set PKRU to a restrictive value, that thread will be able to write to all data, no matter what pkey is set on it. This weakens any integrity guarantees that we want pkeys to provide. To fix this, we define a very restrictive PKRU to override the XSAVE-provided value when we create a new FPU context. We choose a value that only allows access to pkey 0, which is as restrictive as we can practically make it. This does not cause any practical problems with applications using protection keys because we require them to specify initial permissions for each key when it is allocated, which override the restrictive default.
Here you mean the init_access_rights parameter of pkey_alloc()? So will children of fork() after that pkey_alloc() inherit the new value or go default?
In the end, this ensures that threads which do not know how to manage their own pkey rights can not do damage to data which is pkey-protected. 1. I would have thought this was a pretty contrived scenario, except that I heard a bug report from an MPX user who was creating threads in some very early code before main(). It may be crazy, but folks evidently _do_ it. Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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