On Wed, Feb 03, 2021 at 02:55:33PM -0800, Yu-cheng Yu wrote: > When Shadow Stack is introduced, [R/O + _PAGE_DIRTY] PTE is reserved for > shadow stack. Copy-on-write PTEs have [R/O + _PAGE_COW]. > > When a PTE goes from [R/W + _PAGE_DIRTY] to [R/O + _PAGE_COW], it could > become a transient shadow stack PTE in two cases: > > The first case is that some processors can start a write but end up seeing > a read-only PTE by the time they get to the Dirty bit, creating a transient > shadow stack PTE. However, this will not occur on processors supporting > Shadow Stack, and a TLB flush is not necessary. > > The second case is that when _PAGE_DIRTY is replaced with _PAGE_COW non- > atomically, a transient shadow stack PTE can be created as a result. > Thus, prevent that with cmpxchg. > > Dave Hansen, Jann Horn, Andy Lutomirski, and Peter Zijlstra provided many > insights to the issue. Jann Horn provided the cmpxchg solution. > > Signed-off-by: Yu-cheng Yu <yu-cheng.yu@xxxxxxxxx> Reviewed-by: Kees Cook <keescook@xxxxxxxxxxxx> -- Kees Cook
