Re: [PATCH] tools/xg: increase LZMA_BLOCK_SIZE for uncompressing the kernel

[Jan Beulich <jbeulich@xxxxxxxx>]

On 09.10.2024 11:52, Marek Marczykowski-Górecki wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 09, 2024 at 09:19:57AM +0200, Jan Beulich wrote:
>> On 08.10.2024 23:32, Marek Marczykowski-Górecki wrote:
>>> --- a/tools/libs/guest/xg_dom_bzimageloader.c
>>> +++ b/tools/libs/guest/xg_dom_bzimageloader.c
>>> @@ -272,8 +272,7 @@ static int _xc_try_lzma_decode(
>>>      return retval;
>>>  }
>>>  
>>> -/* 128 Mb is the minimum size (half-way) documented to work for all 
>>> inputs. */
>>> -#define LZMA_BLOCK_SIZE (128*1024*1024)
>>> +#define LZMA_BLOCK_SIZE (256*1024*1024)
>>
>> That's as arbitrary as before, now just not even with a comment at least
>> hinting at it being arbitrary. Quoting from one of the LZMA API headers:
>>
>>       * Decoder already supports dictionaries up to 4 GiB - 1 B (i.e.
>>       * UINT32_MAX), so increasing the maximum dictionary size of the
>>       * encoder won't cause problems for old decoders.
>>
>> IOW - what if the Linux folks decided to increase the dictionary size
>> further? I therefore wonder whether we don't need to make this more
>> dynamic, perhaps by peeking into the header to obtain the dictionary
>> size used. The one thing I'm not sure about is whether there can't be
>> multiple such headers throughout the file, and hence (in principle)
>> differing dictionary sizes.
> 
> What is the purpose of this block size limit? From the error message, it
> seems to be avoiding excessive memory usage during decompression (which
> could be DoS via OOM). If that's the case, then taking the limit from
> the kernel binary itself will miss this point (especially in case of
> pygrub or similar, but there may be other cases of not-fully-trusted
> kernel binaries).

Indeed. The question then simply is: Where do we want to draw the line
between what we permit and what we reject?

Jan