[PATCH 0/6] RFC: adding support to GCC for detecting trust boundaries

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Sat, Nov 13, 2021 at 03:37:24PM -0500, David Malcolm wrote:

> This approach is much less expressive that the custom addres space
> approach; it would only cover the trust boundary aspect; it wouldn't
> cover any differences between generic pointers and __user, vs __iomem,
> __percpu, and __rcu which I admit I only dimly understand.

__iomem would point at device memory, which can have curious side
effects or is yet another trust boundary, depending on device and usage.

__percpu is an address space that denotes a per-cpu variable's relative
offset, it needs be combined with a per-cpu offset to get a 'real'
pointer, on x86_64 %gs segment offset is used for this purpose, other
architectures are less fortunate. The whole per_cpu()/this_cpu_*()
family of APIs accepts such pointers.

__rcu is the regular kernel address space, but denotes that the object
pointed to has RCU lifetime management. The attribute is laundered
through rcu_dereference() to remove the __rcu qualifier.

> Possibly silly question: is it always a bug for the value of a kernel
> pointer to leak into user space?  i.e. should I be complaining about an
> infoleak if the value of a trusted_ptr itself is written to
> *untrusted_ptr?  e.g.

Yes, always. Leaking kernel pointers is unconditionally bad.