From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Russell King - ARM Linux Subject: Re: [kernel-hardening] Re: [PATCH v9 1/4] syscalls: Verify address limit before returning to user-mode Date: Fri, 12 May 2017 21:21:06 +0100 Message-ID: <20170512202106.GO22219@n2100.armlinux.org.uk> References: <20170509111007.GA14702@kroah.com> <20170512072802.5a686f23@mschwideX1> <20170512075458.09a3a1ce@mschwideX1> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Return-path: Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: Sender: linux-api-owner-u79uwXL29TY76Z2rM5mHXA@public.gmane.org To: Kees Cook Cc: Linus Torvalds , Mark Rutland , Kernel Hardening , Greg KH , Heiko Carstens , LKML , David Howells , Dave Hansen , "H . Peter Anvin" , Ingo Molnar , Pavel Tikhomirov , linux-s390 , the arch/x86 maintainers , Will Deacon , Christian Borntraeger , =?iso-8859-1?Q?Ren=E9?= Nyffenegger , Catalin Marinas , "Paul E . McKenney" , Ri List-Id: linux-api@vger.kernel.org On Fri, May 12, 2017 at 12:30:02PM -0700, Kees Cook wrote: > I'm clearly not explaining things well enough. I shouldn't say > "corruption", I should say "malicious manipulation". The methodology > of attacks against the stack are quite different from the other kinds > of attacks like use-after-free, heap overflow, etc. Being able to > exhaust the kernel stack (either due to deep recursion or unbounded > alloca()) I really hope we don't have alloca() use in the kernel. Do you have evidence to support that assertion? IMHO alloca() (or similar) should not be present in any kernel code because we have a limited stack - we have kmalloc() etc for that kind of thing. -- RMK's Patch system: http://www.armlinux.org.uk/developer/patches/ FTTC broadband for 0.8mile line: currently at 9.6Mbps down 400kbps up according to speedtest.net.