Using a dedicated page-table for temporary PTEs prevents other cores
from using - even speculatively - these PTEs, thereby providing two
benefits:
(1) Security hardening: an attacker that gains kernel memory writing
abilities cannot easily overwrite sensitive data.
(2) Avoiding TLB shootdowns: the PTEs do not need to be flushed in
remote page-tables.
To do so a temporary mm_struct can be used. Mappings which are private
for this mm can be set in the userspace part of the address-space.
During the whole time in which the temporary mm is loaded, interrupts
must be disabled.
The first use-case for temporary mm struct, which will follow, is for
poking the kernel text.
[ Commit message was written by Nadav Amit ]
Tested-by: Masami Hiramatsu <mhiramat@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Nadav Amit <namit@vmware.com>
Signed-off-by: Rick Edgecombe <rick.p.edgecombe@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Reviewed-by: Masami Hiramatsu <mhiramat@kernel.org>
Cc: <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: <ard.biesheuvel@linaro.org>
Cc: <deneen.t.dock@intel.com>
Cc: <kernel-hardening@lists.openwall.com>
Cc: <kristen@linux.intel.com>
Cc: <linux_dti@icloud.com>
Cc: <will.deacon@arm.com>
Cc: Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com>
Cc: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@surriel.com>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20190426001143.4983-4-namit@vmware.com
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
cefa929c03