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Re: [PATCH] aarch64: fix speculative execution past SVC vulnerability


On 22/01/2020 01:29, Anthony Steinhauser wrote:
> Even though SVC always causes a jump to another address, aarch64 CPUs
> speculatively execute following instructions as if the SVC
> instruction was not a jump instruction.

thanks for the patch, it looks good, but i add
somebody on cc who spent more time on spectre
mitigation in case there is further insight.

> The speculative execution does not cross privilege-levels (to the jump
> target as one would expect), but it continues on the kernel privilege
> level as if the SVC instruction did not change the control flow -

i don't understand this bit: why is anything
executing on the kernel privilege level here?

> thus execution anything that is accidentally linked after the SVC
> instruction. Later, the results of this speculative execution are
> always architecturally discarded, however they can leak data using
> microarchitectural side channels. This speculative execution is very
> reliable (seems to be unconditional) and it manages to complete even
> relatively performance-heavy operations (e.g. multiple dependent
> fetches from uncached memory).
> 
> Something like:
> read(2)
> ...
> [parse read result]
> Gets potentially dangerous, since this would allow us potentially
> reasonably reliably hit uninitialized memory (with potentially attacker
> controlled offsets from prior reads) if we speculate over the SVC in the
> syscall. Particularly in a netspectre-like scope.
> 
> Bugzilla record:
> https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=25436
> 
> Signed-off-by: Anthony Steinhauser <asteinhauser@google.com>
> ---
>  sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/aarch64/sysdep.h | 8 ++++++--
>  1 file changed, 6 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
> 
> diff --git a/sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/aarch64/sysdep.h b/sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/aarch64/sysdep.h
> index 00b8e241c8..cf1e6ed45f 100644
> --- a/sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/aarch64/sysdep.h
> +++ b/sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/aarch64/sysdep.h
> @@ -147,7 +147,9 @@
>  # undef	DO_CALL
>  # define DO_CALL(syscall_name, args)		\
>      mov x8, SYS_ify (syscall_name);		\
> -    svc 0
> +    svc 0;		\
> +    dsb nsh;		\
> +    isb
>  
>  #else /* not __ASSEMBLER__ */
>  
> @@ -191,7 +193,9 @@
>       {								\
>         LOAD_ARGS_##nr (args)					\
>         register long _x8 asm ("x8") = (name);			\
> -       asm volatile ("svc	0	// syscall " # name     \
> +       asm volatile ("svc	0	// syscall\n\t" # name  \
> +		     "dsb	nsh\n\t"				\
> +		     "isb"					\
>  		     : "=r" (_x0) : "r"(_x8) ASM_ARGS_##nr : "memory");	\
>         _sys_result = _x0;					\
>       }								\
> 


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