Re: [patch 0/5] Support for sanitization flag in low-level page allocator

["Larry H." <research@subreption.com>]

On 22:42 Wed 20 May     , Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-05-20 at 11:30 -0700, Larry H. wrote:
> > This patch adds support for the SENSITIVE flag to the low level page
> > allocator. An additional GFP flag is added for use with higher level
> > allocators (GFP_SENSITIVE, which implies GFP_ZERO).
> > 
> > The code is largely based off the memory sanitization feature in the
> > PaX project (licensed under the GPL v2 terms), and allows fine grained
> > marking of pages for sanitization on allocation and release time, as an
> > opt-in feature (instead of its opt-all counterpart in PaX).
> > 
> > This avoids leaking sensitive information when memory is released to
> > the system after use, for example in cryptographic subsystems.
> > 
> > The next patches in this set deploy this flag for different
> > subsystems that could potentially leak cryptographic secrets or other
> > confidential information by means of an information leak or other kinds
> > of security bugs (ex. use of uninitialized variables or use-after-free),
> > besides extending the remanence of this data on memory (allowing
> > Iceman/coldboot attacks possible).
> > 
> > The "Shredding Your Garbage: Reducing Data Lifetime Through Secure
> > Deallocation" paper by Jim Chow et. al from the Stanford University
> > Department of Computer Science, explains the security implications of
> > insecure deallocation, and provides extensive information with figures
> > and applications thoroughly analyzed for this behavior [1]. More recently
> > this issue came to widespread attention when the "Lest We Remember:
> > Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys" (by Halderman et. al) paper was
> > published [2].
> 
> Seems like a particularly wasteful use of a pageflag. Why not simply
> erase the buffer before freeing in those few places where we know its
> important (ie. exactly those places you now put the pageflag in)?

What's wasteful about it? It does not conflict with anything else and
there's plenty of room for other future flags.

The idea of the patch is not merely "protecting" those few places, but
providing a clean, effective generalized method for this purpose. Your
approach means forcing all developers to remember where they have to
place this explicit clearing, and introducing unnecessary code
duplication and an ever growing list of places adding these calls.

Would you be honestly willing to oversee that job?

Point of allocation isn't the same as point of release/freeing.

Also, this let's third-party code (and other kernel interfaces)
use this feature effortlessly. Moreover, this flag allows easy
integration with MAC/security frameworks (for instance, SELinux) to mark
a process as requiring sensitive mappings, in higher level APIs. There are
plans to work on such a patch, which could be independently proposed
to the SELinux maintainers.

	Larry.

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