[RFC PATCH v9 03/13] mm: Add support for eXclusive Page Frame Ownership (XPFO)

[Nadav Amit]

> On Apr 17, 2019, at 10:09 AM, Ingo Molnar <mingo at kernel.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> * Khalid Aziz <khalid.aziz at oracle.com> wrote:
> 
>>> I.e. the original motivation of the XPFO patches was to prevent execution 
>>> of direct kernel mappings. Is this motivation still present if those 
>>> mappings are non-executable?
>>> 
>>> (Sorry if this has been asked and answered in previous discussions.)
>> 
>> Hi Ingo,
>> 
>> That is a good question. Because of the cost of XPFO, we have to be very
>> sure we need this protection. The paper from Vasileios, Michalis and
>> Angelos - <http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~vpk/papers/ret2dir.sec14.pdf>,
>> does go into how ret2dir attacks can bypass SMAP/SMEP in sections 6.1
>> and 6.2.
> 
> So it would be nice if you could generally summarize external arguments 
> when defending a patchset, instead of me having to dig through a PDF 
> which not only causes me to spend time that you probably already spent 
> reading that PDF, but I might also interpret it incorrectly. ;-)
> 
> The PDF you cited says this:
> 
>  "Unfortunately, as shown in Table 1, the W^X prop-erty is not enforced 
>   in many platforms, including x86-64.  In our example, the content of 
>   user address 0xBEEF000 is also accessible through kernel address 
>   0xFFFF87FF9F080000 as plain, executable code."
> 
> Is this actually true of modern x86-64 kernels? We've locked down W^X 
> protections in general.

As I was curious, I looked at the paper. Here is a quote from it:

"In x86-64, however, the permissions of physmap are not in sane state.
Kernels up to v3.8.13 violate the W^X property by mapping the entire region
as “readable, writeable, and executable” (RWX)—only very recent kernels
(≥v3.9) use the more conservative RW mapping.”