On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 03:20:43AM +0300, Solar Designer wrote: > Jann Horn wrote: > > To prevent an attacker from turning a mostly harmless oops into an > > exploitable issue using a refcounter wraparound caused by repeated > > oopsing, limit the number of oopses. > > This may also reduce the likelihood of successful exploitation of some > other vulnerabilities involving memory corruption, where an unsuccessful > attempt may inadvertently trigger an Oops. The attacker would then need > to succeed in fewer than the maximum allowed number of Oops'es. Jann's > currently proposed default of 0x100000 is too high to make a difference > in that respect, but people may set it differently. I chose such a high value to increase the likelyhood that this gets included in the kernel by default. Lower values would mitigate more attacks, but I'm not sure whether they'd be acceptable for everyone. > On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 10:34:39AM +1100, Daniel Axtens wrote: > > I'm torn between making the limit configurable and not adding to the > > massive proliferation of config options. > > What about reusing panic_on_oops for the configurable limit? The > currently supported values of 0 and 1 would retain their meaning, > 2 would panic after 2nd Oops, and so on. > > There's overlap with grsecurity's banning of users on Oops, but I think > it makes sense to have both the trivial change proposed by Jann (perhaps > with the reuse of panic_on_oops for configuration) and grsecurity-style > banning (maybe with a low configurable limit, rather than always on > first Oops). One edgecase here is that, afaik, grsecurity-style banning isn't very effective in combination with the subuid mechanism (implemented in userland, using the newuidmap setuid helper and /etc/subuid) because it allows every user to control 2^16 kuids (not just inside namespaces, but also indirectly in the init namespace). This probably doesn't affect many people though: Debian and Ubuntu ship newuidmap in a separate package "uidmap" that isn't installed by default and is only installed by a few people (0.18% on Debian according to popcon, those probably need it for unprivileged LXC or so?). Arch ships with newuidmap installed, but without /etc/subuid. I don't know what other distros do.