Getting weird TPM error after rebasing my tree to security/next-general

[Linus Torvalds]

On Thu, Jan 31, 2019 at 10:35 AM Jarkko Sakkinen
<jarkko.sakkinen at linux.intel.com> wrote:
>
> OK, so the length of the response is not trashed, but only the error
> code. The attached patch fully fixes the issue.
>
> Here's the header again:
>
> struct tpm_output_header {
>         __be16  tag;
>         __be32  length;
>         __be32  return_code;
> } __packed;
>
> The first to fields *are* read correctly and the last field get 1's
> (thus TPM error -1).

Ok, so this makes sense, even though that patch is (I think) completely wrong.

What happens is that the 32-bit fields are mis-aligned: the "tag" is
obviously properly 16-bit aligned, but then both "length" and
"return_code" are 32-bit fields that are only aligned on a 16-bit
alignment.

What happens is that first you copy the two first fields:

        memcpy_fromio(buf, priv->rsp, 6);

which copies "tag" and "length", but it copies them by reading then as
a 4-byte and then 2-byte value (in that order). So it actually reads
'tag' and 'first two bytes of 'length', and then the second access
reads the last two bytes of 'length'

And it all works, because the accesses are aligned by address of
access, even though they are *not* aligned in the 'struct
tpm_output_header' fields.

But then later on, when you read 'return_code', and do

        memcpy_fromio(&buf[6], &priv->rsp[6], expected - 6);

you now do a 4-byte memcpy at offset 6. So it does a 4-byte access,
bit it's not 4-byte aligned.

Honestly, memcpy() itself shouldn't have worked *either*, but you
lucked out. Gcc doesn't know that it's a 4-byte access, so it actually
calls out to the memcpy() routine. And that one happened to be "rep
movsb" on your machine. And that happened to work.

But it's really not supposed to work, and it really *wouldn't* have
worked if somebody disabled the rep-string functions.

In fact, we have another patch (that isn't applied) that makes even
the memcpy_erms() just call the sw version of memcpy() for short
copies (because "rep movsb" is slow for those cases). That would also
have broken your driver.

               Linus