[RFC PATCH 2/7] x86/sci: add core implementation for system call isolation

[Ingo Molnar]

* Robert O'Callahan <robert at ocallahan.org> wrote:

> On Sat, Apr 27, 2019 at 10:46 PM Ingo Molnar <mingo at kernel.org> wrote:
> >  - A C language runtime that is a subset of current C syntax and
> >    semantics used in the kernel, and which doesn't allow access outside
> >    of existing objects and thus creates a strictly enforced separation
> >    between memory used for data, and memory used for code and control
> >    flow.
> >
> >  - This would involve, at minimum:
> >
> >     - tracking every type and object and its inherent length and valid
> >       access patterns, and never losing track of its type.
> >
> >     - being a lot more organized about initialization, i.e. no
> >       uninitialized variables/fields.
> >
> >     - being a lot more strict about type conversions and pointers in
> >       general.
> >
> >     - ... and a metric ton of other details.
> 
> Several research groups have tried to do this, and it is very
> difficult to do. In particular this was almost exactly the goal of
> C-Cured [1]. Much more recently, there's Microsoft's CheckedC [2] [3],
> which is less ambitious. Check the references of the latter for lots
> of relevant work. If anyone really pursues this they should talk
> directly to researchers who've worked on this, e.g. George Necula; you
> need to know what *didn't* work well, which is hard to glean from
> papers. (Academic publishing is broken that way.)
> 
> One problem with adopting "safe C" or Rust in the kernel is that most
> of your security mitigations (e.g. KASLR, CFI, other randomizations)
> probably need to remain in place as long as there is a significant
> amount of C in the kernel, which means the benefits from eliminating
> them will be realized very far in the future, if ever, which makes the
> whole exercise harder to justify.
> 
> Having said that, I think there's a good case to be made for writing
> kernel code in Rust, e.g. sketchy drivers. The classes of bugs
> prevented in Rust are significantly broader than your usual safe-C
> dialect (e.g. data races).
> 
> [1] https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~weimerw/p/p477-necula.pdf
> [2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2019/05/checkedc-post2019.pdf
> [3] https://github.com/Microsoft/checkedc

So what might work better is if we defined a Rust dialect that used C 
syntax. I.e. the end result would be something like the 'c2rust' or 
'citrus' projects, where code like this would be directly translatable to 
Rust:

void gz_compress(FILE * in, gzFile out)
{
	char buf[BUFLEN];
	int len;
	int err;

	for (;;) {
		len = fread(buf, 1, sizeof(buf), in);
		if (ferror(in)) {
			perror("fread");
			exit(1);
		}
		if (len == 0)
			break;
		if (gzwrite(out, buf, (unsigned)len) != len)
			error(gzerror(out, &err));
	}
	fclose(in);

	if (gzclose(out) != Z_OK)
		error("failed gzclose");
}


#[no_mangle]
pub unsafe extern "C" fn gz_compress(mut in_: *mut FILE, mut out: gzFile) {
    let mut buf: [i8; 16384];
    let mut len;
    let mut err;
    loop  {
        len = fread(buf, 1, std::mem::size_of_val(&buf), in_);
        if ferror(in_) != 0 { perror("fread"); exit(1); }
        if len == 0 { break ; }
        if gzwrite(out, buf, len as c_uint) != len {
            error(gzerror(out, &mut err));
        };
    }
    fclose(in_);
    if gzclose(out) != Z_OK { error("failed gzclose"); };
}

Example taken from:

   https://gitlab.com/citrus-rs/citrus

Does this make sense?

Thanks,

	Ingo