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arch: Introduce post-init read-only memory
One of the easiest ways to protect the kernel from attack is to reduce the internal attack surface exposed when a "write" flaw is available. By making as much of the kernel read-only as possible, we reduce the attack surface. Many things are written to only during __init, and never changed again. These cannot be made "const" since the compiler will do the wrong thing (we do actually need to write to them). Instead, move these items into a memory region that will be made read-only during mark_rodata_ro() which happens after all kernel __init code has finished. This introduces __ro_after_init as a way to mark such memory, and adds some documentation about the existing __read_mostly marking. This improves the security of the Linux kernel by marking formerly read-write memory regions as read-only on a fully booted up system. Based on work by PaX Team and Brad Spengler. Signed-off-by: Kees Cook <[email protected]> Cc: Andy Lutomirski <[email protected]> Cc: Arnd Bergmann <[email protected]> Cc: Borislav Petkov <[email protected]> Cc: Brad Spengler <[email protected]> Cc: Brian Gerst <[email protected]> Cc: David Brown <[email protected]> Cc: Denys Vlasenko <[email protected]> Cc: Emese Revfy <[email protected]> Cc: H. Peter Anvin <[email protected]> Cc: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]> Cc: Mathias Krause <[email protected]> Cc: Michael Ellerman <[email protected]> Cc: PaX Team <[email protected]> Cc: Peter Zijlstra <[email protected]> Cc: Thomas Gleixner <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected] Cc: linux-arch <[email protected]> Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/[email protected] Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <[email protected]>
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