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Userfaultfd can be misued to make it easier to exploit existing use-after-free (and similar) bugs that might otherwise only make a short window or race condition available. By using userfaultfd to stall a kernel thread, a malicious program can keep some state that it wrote, stable for an extended period, which it can then access using an existing exploit. While it doesn't cause the exploit itself, and while it's not the only thing that can stall a kernel thread when accessing a memory location, it's one of the few that never needs privilege. We can add a flag, allowing userfaultfd to be restricted, so that in general it won't be useable by arbitrary user programs, but in environments that require userfaultfd it can be turned back on. Add a global sysctl knob "vm.unprivileged_userfaultfd" to control whether userfaultfd is allowed by unprivileged users. When this is set to zero, only privileged users (root user, or users with the CAP_SYS_PTRACE capability) will be able to use the userfaultfd syscalls. Andrea said: : The only difference between the bpf sysctl and the userfaultfd sysctl : this way is that the bpf sysctl adds the CAP_SYS_ADMIN capability : requirement, while userfaultfd adds the CAP_SYS_PTRACE requirement, : because the userfaultfd monitor is more likely to need CAP_SYS_PTRACE : already if it's doing other kind of tracking on processes runtime, in : addition of userfaultfd. In other words both syscalls works only for : root, when the two sysctl are opt-in set to 1. [dgilbert@redhat.com: changelog additions] [akpm@linux-foundation.org: documentation tweak, per Mike] Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20190319030722.12441-2-peterx@redhat.com Signed-off-by: Peter Xu <peterx@redhat.com> Suggested-by: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com> Suggested-by: Mike Rapoport <rppt@linux.ibm.com> Reviewed-by: Mike Rapoport <rppt@linux.ibm.com> Reviewed-by: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com> Cc: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com> Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com> Cc: Luis Chamberlain <mcgrof@kernel.org> Cc: Maxime Coquelin <maxime.coquelin@redhat.com> Cc: Maya Gokhale <gokhale2@llnl.gov> Cc: Jerome Glisse <jglisse@redhat.com> Cc: Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@virtuozzo.com> Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> Cc: Martin Cracauer <cracauer@cons.org> Cc: Denis Plotnikov <dplotnikov@virtuozzo.com> Cc: Marty McFadden <mcfadden8@llnl.gov> Cc: Mike Kravetz <mike.kravetz@oracle.com> Cc: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org> Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Cc: "Kirill A . Shutemov" <kirill@shutemov.name> Cc: "Dr . David Alan Gilbert" <dgilbert@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> |
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README
Documentation for /proc/sys/ kernel version 2.2.10 (c) 1998, 1999, Rik van Riel <riel@nl.linux.org> 'Why', I hear you ask, 'would anyone even _want_ documentation for them sysctl files? If anybody really needs it, it's all in the source...' Well, this documentation is written because some people either don't know they need to tweak something, or because they don't have the time or knowledge to read the source code. Furthermore, the programmers who built sysctl have built it to be actually used, not just for the fun of programming it :-) ============================================================== Legal blurb: As usual, there are two main things to consider: 1. you get what you pay for 2. it's free The consequences are that I won't guarantee the correctness of this document, and if you come to me complaining about how you screwed up your system because of wrong documentation, I won't feel sorry for you. I might even laugh at you... But of course, if you _do_ manage to screw up your system using only the sysctl options used in this file, I'd like to hear of it. Not only to have a great laugh, but also to make sure that you're the last RTFMing person to screw up. In short, e-mail your suggestions, corrections and / or horror stories to: <riel@nl.linux.org> Rik van Riel. ============================================================== Introduction: Sysctl is a means of configuring certain aspects of the kernel at run-time, and the /proc/sys/ directory is there so that you don't even need special tools to do it! In fact, there are only four things needed to use these config facilities: - a running Linux system - root access - common sense (this is especially hard to come by these days) - knowledge of what all those values mean As a quick 'ls /proc/sys' will show, the directory consists of several (arch-dependent?) subdirs. Each subdir is mainly about one part of the kernel, so you can do configuration on a piece by piece basis, or just some 'thematic frobbing'. The subdirs are about: abi/ execution domains & personalities debug/ <empty> dev/ device specific information (eg dev/cdrom/info) fs/ specific filesystems filehandle, inode, dentry and quota tuning binfmt_misc <Documentation/admin-guide/binfmt-misc.rst> kernel/ global kernel info / tuning miscellaneous stuff net/ networking stuff, for documentation look in: <Documentation/networking/> proc/ <empty> sunrpc/ SUN Remote Procedure Call (NFS) vm/ memory management tuning buffer and cache management user/ Per user per user namespace limits These are the subdirs I have on my system. There might be more or other subdirs in another setup. If you see another dir, I'd really like to hear about it :-)