[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [PATCH 1/2] xen/arm: entry: Place a speculation barrier following an ret instruction



On 17/06/2020 17:23, Julien Grall wrote:
Hi,

On 16/06/2020 22:24, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
On Tue, 16 Jun 2020, Julien Grall wrote:
From: Julien Grall <jgrall@xxxxxxxxxx>

Some CPUs can speculate past a RET instruction and potentially perform
speculative accesses to memory before processing the return.

There is no known gadget available after the RET instruction today.
However some of the registers (such as in check_pending_guest_serror())
may contain a value provided the guest.
                               ^ by


In order to harden the code, it would be better to add a speculation
barrier after each RET instruction. The performance is meant to be
negligeable as the speculation barrier is not meant to be archicturally
executed.

Note that on arm32, the ldmia instruction will act as a return from the
function __context_switch(). While the whitepaper doesn't suggest it is
possible to speculate after the instruction, add preventively a
speculation barrier after it as well.

This is part of the work to mitigate straight-line speculation.

Signed-off-by: Julien Grall <jgrall@xxxxxxxxxx>

Reviewed-by: Stefano Stabellini <sstabellini@xxxxxxxxxx>

I did a compile-test on the patch too.


---

I am still unsure whether we preventively should add a speculation barrier preventively after all the RET instructions in arm*/lib/. The smc call be
taken care in a follow-up patch.

SMC is great to have but it seems to be overkill to do the ones under
lib/.
From my understanding, the compiler will add a speculation barrier preventively after each 'ret' when the mitigation are turned on.So it feels to me we want to follow the same approach.

Obviously, we can avoid them but I would like to have a justification for not adding them (nothing is overkilled against speculation ;)).

I finally found some time to look at arm*/lib in more details. Some of the helpers can definitely be called with guest inputs.

For instance, memchr() is called from hypfs_get_path_user() with the 3rd argument controlled by the guest. In both 32-bit and 64-bit implementation, you will reach the end of the function memchr() with r2/w2 and r3/w3 (it contains a character from the buffer) controlled by the guest.

As this is the only function in the unit, we don't know what will be the instructions right after RET. So it would be safer to add a speculation barrier there too.

Note that hypfs is currently only accessibly by Dom0. Yet, I still think we should try to harden any code if we can :).

Cheers,

--
Julien Grall



 


Rackspace

Lists.xenproject.org is hosted with RackSpace, monitoring our
servers 24x7x365 and backed by RackSpace's Fanatical Support®.