Re: [PATCH v5] virtio-blk: Add validation for block size in config space

[Yongji Xie <xieyongji@bytedance.com>]

On Mon, Aug 23, 2021 at 5:04 PM Max Gurtovoy <mgurtovoy@nvidia.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 8/23/2021 11:35 AM, Yongji Xie wrote:
> > On Mon, Aug 23, 2021 at 4:07 PM Max Gurtovoy <mgurtovoy@nvidia.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> On 8/23/2021 7:31 AM, Yongji Xie wrote:
> >>> On Mon, Aug 23, 2021 at 7:17 AM Max Gurtovoy <mgurtovoy@nvidia.com> wrote:
> >>>> On 8/9/2021 1:16 PM, Xie Yongji wrote:
> >>>>> An untrusted device might presents an invalid block size
> >>>>> in configuration space. This tries to add validation for it
> >>>>> in the validate callback and clear the VIRTIO_BLK_F_BLK_SIZE
> >>>>> feature bit if the value is out of the supported range.
> >>>> This is not clear to me. What is untrusted device ? is it a buggy device ?
> >>>>
> >>> A buggy device, the devices in an encrypted VM, or a userspace device
> >>> created by VDUSE [1].
> >>>
> >>> [1] https://lore.kernel.org/kvm/20210818120642.165-1-xieyongji@bytedance.com/
> >> if it's a userspace device, why don't you fix its control path code
> >> instead of adding workarounds in the kernel driver ?
> >>
> > VDUSE kernel module would not touch (be aware of) the device specific
> > configuration space. It should be more reasonable to fix it in the
> > device driver. There is also some existing interface (.validate()) for
> > doing that.
>
> who is emulating the device configuration space ?
>

A userspace daemon will initialize the device configuration space and
pass the contents to the VDUSE kernel module. The VDUSE kernel module
will handle the access of the config space from the virtio device
driver, but it doesn't need to know the contents (although we can know
that).

> > And regardless of userspace device, we still need to fix it for other cases.
>
> which cases ? Do you know that there is a buggy HW we need to workaround ?
>

No, there isn't now. But this could be a potential attack surface if
the host doesn't trust the device.

Thanks,
Yongji