Hi Pedro
On Sun, Sep 8, 2024 at 2:56 PM Pedro Falcato <pedro.falcato@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Sep 8, 2024 at 10:35 PM Pedro Falcato <pedro.falcato@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I agree with most of the points. Sitting down here to write unofficial
> > guidelines for mseal behavior.
> >
> > mseal should seal regions and mark them immutable, which means their protection
> > and contents (ish?) (not _only_ backing mapping, but also contents in general
> > (see madvise below)) should not be changed throughout the lifetime of the address space.
> >
> > For the general syscall interface, this means:
> > 1) mprotect and munmap need to be blocked on mseal regions.
> > 1a) munmap _cannot_ tolerate partial failure, per POSIX.
> > 2b) mmap MAP_FIXED counts as an unmap operation and also needs to be blocked and return -EPERM.
> >
> > 2) Most madvise calls are allowed, except for destructive operations on
> > read-only anonymous _pages_ (MADV_DONTNEED is destructive for anon, but we also don't care
> > about blocking these ops if we can do it manually with e.g memset)
> > 2a) The current implementation only blocks discard on anonymous _regions_, which is slightly
> > different. We probably do want to block these on MAP_PRIVATE file mappings, as to block
> > stuff like madvise MADV_DONTNEED on program rodata.
> > 2b) We take into account pkeys when doing the permission checks.
> >
> > 3) mremap is not allowed as we'd change the "contents" of the old region.
> > 3a) Should mremap expansion be allowed? aka only block moving and shrinking, but allow expansion.
> > We already informally allow expansion if e.g mmapping after it + mseal.
> >
> > 4) mlock and msync are allowed.
> >
> > 5) mseal is blocked.
> >
> > 6) Other miscellaneous syscalls (mbind, etc) that do not change contents in any way, are allowed.
> > 6a) This obviously means PTEs can change as long as the contents don't. Swapping is also ok.
> >
> > 7) FOLL_FORCE (kernel-internal speak, more commonly seen as ptrace and /proc/self/mem from userspace)
> > should be disallowed (?)
> > 7a) This currently does not happen, and seems like a large hole? But disallowing this
> > would probably severely break ptrace if the ELF sealing plans come to fruition.
> >
> > When we say "disallowed", we usually (apart from munmap) allow for partial failure. This
> > means getting an -EPERM while part of the call succeeded, if we e.g mprotect a region consisting
> > of [NORMAL VMA][SEALED VMA]. We do not want to test for this, because we do not want to paint ourselves
> > into a corner - this is strictly "undefined behavior". The msealed regions themselves
> > will never be touched in such cases. (we do however want to test munmap operation atomicity, but this is
> > also kind of a munmap-related test, and might not really be something we really want in the mseal tests)
> >
> > Kernel-internal wise: The VMA and PTE modifications resulting from the above operations are blocked.
> > Sealed VMAs allow splitting and merging; there was contention about the splitting issue, but it truly
> > does not make sense to block operations unless they affect a VMA entirely, and that would also force
> > VMA merging to be ABI ("vma_merge isn't merging these two regions and now my madvise works/doesn't work :(").
> >
> >
> > Do I have everything right? Am I missing anything?
>
> Small addendum: file write, truncate and hole punching might also
> matter for sealed file-backed regions, as these change the region's
> contents, but we probably
> want to rely on file write permissions to protect against this (as we
> already do). Any other solution is probably terrible and probably
> endlessly NAK'd by fs folks, but it does
> mean sealed regions aren't really immutable if you or the attacker can
> write to the file.
>
Right. The mseal protects the control-data of VMA (e.g. prot),
it doesn't do anything more than that. The file permission relies on
dac/mac control.
-Jeff
> --
> Pedro
