Hardware assisted tracing families such as ARM Coresight, Intel PT
provides rich tracing capabilities including instruction level
tracing and accurate timestamps which are very useful for profiling
and also pose a significant security risk. One such example of
security risk is when kernel mode tracing is not excluded and these
hardware assisted tracing can be used to analyze cryptographic code
execution. In this case, even the root user must not be able to infer
anything.
To explain it more clearly in the words of a security team member
(credits: Mattias Nissler),
"Consider a system where disk contents are encrypted and the encryption
key is set up by the user when mounting the file system. From that point
on the encryption key resides in the kernel. It seems reasonable to
expect that the disk encryption key be protected from exfiltration even
if the system later suffers a root compromise (or even against insiders
that have root access), at least as long as the attacker doesn't
manage to compromise the kernel."
Here the idea is to protect such important information from all users
including root users since root privileges does not have to mean full
control over the kernel [1] and root compromise does not have to be
the end of the world.
But "Peter said even the regular counters can be used for full branch trace,
the information isn't as accurate as PT and friends and not easier but
is good enough to infer plenty". This would mean that a global tunable
config for all kernel mode pmu tracing is more appropriate than the one
targeting the hardware assisted instruction tracing.
Currently we can exclude kernel mode tracing via perf_event_paranoid
sysctl but it has following limitations,
* No option to restrict kernel mode instruction tracing by the
root user.
* Not possible to restrict kernel mode instruction tracing when the
hardware assisted tracing IPs like ARM Coresight ETMs use an
additional interface via sysfs for tracing in addition to perf
interface.
So introduce a new config CONFIG_EXCLUDE_KERNEL_PMU_TRACE to exclude
kernel mode pmu tracing for all users including root which will be
generic and applicable to all hardware tracing families and which
can also be used with other interfaces like sysfs in case of ETMs.
Patch 1 adds this new config and the support in perf core to exclude
all kernel mode PMU tracing.
Patch 2 adds the perf evsel warning message when the perf tool users
attempt to perform a kernel mode trace with the config enabled to
exclude the kernel mode tracing.
Patch 3 and Patch 4 adds the support for excluding kernel mode for
ARM Coresight ETM{4,3}XX sysfs mode using the newly introduced generic
config.
[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/796866/
Changes in v2:
* Move from kernel mode instruction tracing to all kernel level PMU tracing (Peter)
* Move the check and warning to the caller mode_store() (Doug)
Sai Prakash Ranjan (4):
perf/core: Add support to exclude kernel mode PMU tracing
perf evsel: Print warning for excluding kernel mode instruction
tracing
coresight: etm4x: Add support to exclude kernel mode tracing
coresight: etm3x: Add support to exclude kernel mode tracing
drivers/hwtracing/coresight/coresight-etm3x-core.c | 3 +++
drivers/hwtracing/coresight/coresight-etm3x-sysfs.c | 6 ++++++
drivers/hwtracing/coresight/coresight-etm4x-core.c | 6 +++++-
drivers/hwtracing/coresight/coresight-etm4x-sysfs.c | 6 ++++++
init/Kconfig | 11 +++++++++++
kernel/events/core.c | 3 +++
tools/perf/util/evsel.c | 3 ++-
7 files changed, 36 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
--
QUALCOMM INDIA, on behalf of Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc. is a member
of Code Aurora Forum, hosted by The Linux Foundation
