From: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
To: Paulo Miguel Almeida <paulo.miguel.almeida.rodenas@gmail.com>
Cc: Christine Caulfield <ccaulfie@redhat.com>,
David Teigland <teigland@redhat.com>,
cluster-devel@redhat.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
linux-hardening@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2][next] dlm: Replace one-element array with flexible-array member
Date: Sat, 8 Oct 2022 21:03:28 -0700 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <202210082044.51106145BD@keescook> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <Y0IsXXYnS4DnWkMW@mail.google.com>
On Sun, Oct 09, 2022 at 03:05:17PM +1300, Paulo Miguel Almeida wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 08, 2022 at 05:18:35PM -0700, Kees Cook wrote:
> > This is allocating 1 more byte than before, since the struct size didn't change. But this has always allocated too much space, due to the struct padding. For a "no binary changes" patch, the above "+ 1" needs to be left off.
>
> That's true. I agree that leaving "+ 1" would work and produce a
> no-binary-changes patch due to the existing padding that the structure
> has. OTOH, I thought that relying on that space could bite us in the
> future if anyone tweaks the struct again...so my reaction was to ensure
> that the NUL-terminator space was always guaranteed to be there.
> Hence, the change on c693 (objdump above).
>
> What do you think? Should we keep or leave the above
> "+ 1" after the rationale above?
I think it depends on what's expected from this allocation. Christine or
David, can you speak to this?
> > I would expect the correct allocation size to be:
> > offsetof(typeof(*ls), ls_name) + namelen
>
> Fair point, I will make this change.
Well, only do that if we don't depend on the padding nor a trailing
%NUL. :)
> > Question, though: is ls_name _expected_ to be %NUL terminated
>
> Yes, it is. I tracked down ls_name's utilisations and it is passed down to
> a bunch of routines that expects it to be NUL-terminated such as
> snprintf and vsnprintf.
Agreed: I see the string functions it gets passed to. So, then the next
question I have is does "namelen" take into account the %NUL, and is
"name" %NUL terminated? Those answers appear to be "no" and "yes",
respectively:
static int new_lockspace(const char *name, ...)
{
...
int namelen = strlen(name);
The comparisons for ls->ls_namelen are all done without the %NUL count:
if (ls->ls_namelen != namelen)
continue;
if (memcmp(ls->ls_name, name, namelen))
continue;
> >, and was the prior 3 bytes of extra allocation accidentally required?
> >
>
> I am assuming that you are refering to ls_namelen in the struct dlm_ls
> (please correct me if this isn't what you meant).
No, I meant ls_name (the pahole output shows the trailing 3 bytes of
padding before. And with your patch it becomes 4 bytes of trailing
padding.
So I think this is "accidentally correct", since it's so carefully using
memcmp() and not strcmp().
Given the existing padding on the structure, through, it likely needs
to keep a certain amount of minimum padding.
original size was actually this, so you could use this for the new
calculation to get the same values as before:
offsetof(typeof(*ls), ls_name) + 4 + namelen;
In reality, it may be possible to do this to get exactly what is needed,
but no less than the struct itself:
max(offsetof(typeof(*ls), ls_name) + 1 + namelen, sizeof(*ls));
-Kees
--
Kees Cook
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2022-10-09 4:03 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 16+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2022-10-08 23:17 [PATCH v2][next] dlm: Replace one-element array with flexible-array member Paulo Miguel Almeida
2022-10-09 0:18 ` Kees Cook
2022-10-09 2:05 ` Paulo Miguel Almeida
2022-10-09 4:03 ` Kees Cook [this message]
2022-10-10 21:00 ` David Teigland
2022-10-10 22:35 ` Kees Cook
2022-10-11 15:20 ` David Teigland
2022-10-11 18:44 ` Paulo Miguel Almeida
2022-10-11 20:04 ` [PATCH v4] [next] dlm: replace one-element array with fixed size array Paulo Miguel Almeida
2022-10-11 20:06 ` Kees Cook
2022-10-11 20:11 ` Paulo Miguel Almeida
2022-10-11 20:23 ` [PATCH v5] " Paulo Miguel Almeida
2022-10-11 20:26 ` Gustavo A. R. Silva
2022-10-11 22:18 ` Kees Cook
2022-11-04 5:00 ` Paulo Miguel Almeida
2022-11-04 17:50 ` [Cluster-devel] " Alexander Aring
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