Re: [PATCH] signal: Extend exec_id to 64bits

[ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman)]

Jann Horn <jannh@google.com> writes:

> On Wed, Apr 1, 2020 at 10:50 PM Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com> wrote:
>> Replace the 32bit exec_id with a 64bit exec_id to make it impossible
>> to wrap the exec_id counter.  With care an attacker can cause exec_id
>> wrap and send arbitrary signals to a newly exec'd parent.  This
>> bypasses the signal sending checks if the parent changes their
>> credentials during exec.
>>
>> The severity of this problem can been seen that in my limited testing
>> of a 32bit exec_id it can take as little as 19s to exec 65536 times.
>> Which means that it can take as little as 14 days to wrap a 32bit
>> exec_id.  Adam Zabrocki has succeeded wrapping the self_exe_id in 7
>> days.  Even my slower timing is in the uptime of a typical server.
>
> FYI, if you actually optimize this, it's more like 12s to exec 1048576
> times according to my test, which means ~14 hours for 2^32 executions
> (on a single core). That's on an i7-4790 (a Haswell desktop processor
> that was launched about six years ago, in 2014).

Half a day.  I am not at all surprised, but it is good to know it can
take so little time.

Eric