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x86/mm: Introduce temporary mm structs
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Using a dedicated page-table for temporary PTEs prevents other cores
from using - even speculatively - these PTEs, thereby providing two
benefits:

(1) Security hardening: an attacker that gains kernel memory writing
    abilities cannot easily overwrite sensitive data.

(2) Avoiding TLB shootdowns: the PTEs do not need to be flushed in
    remote page-tables.

To do so a temporary mm_struct can be used. Mappings which are private
for this mm can be set in the userspace part of the address-space.
During the whole time in which the temporary mm is loaded, interrupts
must be disabled.

The first use-case for temporary mm struct, which will follow, is for
poking the kernel text.

[ Commit message was written by Nadav Amit ]

Tested-by: Masami Hiramatsu <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Andy Lutomirski <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Nadav Amit <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Rick Edgecombe <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <[email protected]>
Reviewed-by: Masami Hiramatsu <[email protected]>
Cc: <[email protected]>
Cc: <[email protected]>
Cc: <[email protected]>
Cc: <[email protected]>
Cc: <[email protected]>
Cc: <[email protected]>
Cc: <[email protected]>
Cc: Borislav Petkov <[email protected]>
Cc: Dave Hansen <[email protected]>
Cc: H. Peter Anvin <[email protected]>
Cc: Kees Cook <[email protected]>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
Cc: Rik van Riel <[email protected]>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <[email protected]>
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/[email protected]
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <[email protected]>
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amluto authored and Ingo Molnar committed Apr 30, 2019
1 parent 1fd8de4 commit cefa929
Showing 1 changed file with 33 additions and 0 deletions.
33 changes: 33 additions & 0 deletions arch/x86/include/asm/mmu_context.h
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -356,4 +356,37 @@ static inline unsigned long __get_current_cr3_fast(void)
return cr3;
}

typedef struct {
struct mm_struct *mm;
} temp_mm_state_t;

/*
* Using a temporary mm allows to set temporary mappings that are not accessible
* by other CPUs. Such mappings are needed to perform sensitive memory writes
* that override the kernel memory protections (e.g., W^X), without exposing the
* temporary page-table mappings that are required for these write operations to
* other CPUs. Using a temporary mm also allows to avoid TLB shootdowns when the
* mapping is torn down.
*
* Context: The temporary mm needs to be used exclusively by a single core. To
* harden security IRQs must be disabled while the temporary mm is
* loaded, thereby preventing interrupt handler bugs from overriding
* the kernel memory protection.
*/
static inline temp_mm_state_t use_temporary_mm(struct mm_struct *mm)
{
temp_mm_state_t temp_state;

lockdep_assert_irqs_disabled();
temp_state.mm = this_cpu_read(cpu_tlbstate.loaded_mm);
switch_mm_irqs_off(NULL, mm, current);
return temp_state;
}

static inline void unuse_temporary_mm(temp_mm_state_t prev_state)
{
lockdep_assert_irqs_disabled();
switch_mm_irqs_off(NULL, prev_state.mm, current);
}

#endif /* _ASM_X86_MMU_CONTEXT_H */

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