Re: [PATCH v2] userfaultfd: preserve user-supplied address tag in struct uffd_msg

[Lokesh Gidra <lokeshgidra@google.com>]

On Thu, Jul 1, 2021 at 10:50 AM Peter Collingbourne <pcc@google.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Jul 1, 2021 at 8:51 AM Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi Peter,
> >
> > On Wed, Jun 30, 2021 at 04:29:31PM -0700, Peter Collingbourne wrote:
> > > If a user program uses userfaultfd on ranges of heap memory, it may
> > > end up passing a tagged pointer to the kernel in the range.start
> > > field of the UFFDIO_REGISTER ioctl. This can happen when using an
> > > MTE-capable allocator, or on Android if using the Tagged Pointers
> > > feature for MTE readiness [1].
> >
> > When we added the tagged addr ABI, we realised it's nearly impossible to
> > sort out all ioctls, so we added a note to the documentation that any
> > address other than pointer to user structures as arguments to ioctl()
> > should be untagged. Arguably, userfaultfd is not a random device but if
> > we place it in the same category as mmap/mremap/brk, those don't allow
> > tagged pointers either. And we do expect some apps to break when they
> > rely on malloc() to return untagged pointers.
>
> Okay, so arguably another approach would be to make userfaultfd
> consistent with mmap/mremap/brk and let the UFFDIO_REGISTER fail if
> given a tagged address.
>
This approach also seems reasonable. The problem, as things stand
today, is that UFFDIO_REGISTER doesn't complain when a tagged pointer
is used to register a memory range. But eventually the returned fault
address in messages are untagged. If UFFDIO_REGISTER were to fail on
passing a tagged pointer, then the userspace can address the issue.

> > > When a fault subsequently occurs, the tag is stripped from the fault
> > > address returned to the application in the fault.address field
> > > of struct uffd_msg. However, from the application's perspective,
> > > the tagged address *is* the memory address, so if the application
> > > is unaware of memory tags, it may get confused by receiving an
> > > address that is, from its point of view, outside of the bounds of the
> > > allocation. We observed this behavior in the kselftest for userfaultfd
> > > [2] but other applications could have the same problem.
> >
> > Just curious, what's generating the tagged pointers in the kselftest? Is
> > it posix_memalign()?
>
> Yes, on Android that call goes into our allocator which returns the
> tagged pointer.
>
> > > Fix this by remembering which tag was used to originally register the
> > > userfaultfd and passing that tag back in fault.address. In a future
> > > enhancement, we may want to pass back the original fault address,
> > > but like SA_EXPOSE_TAGBITS, this should be guarded by a flag.
> >
> > I don't see exposing the tagged fault address vs making up a tag (from
> > the original request) that different. I find the former cleaner from an
> > ABI perspective, though it's a bit more intrusive to pass the tagged
> > address via handle_mm_fault().
> >
> > My preference is to fix this in user-space entirely, by explicit
> > untagging of the malloc'ed pointer either before being passed to
> > userfaultfd or when handling the userfaultfd message. How common is it
> > for apps to register malloc'ed pointers with userfaultfd? I was hoping
> > that's more of an (anonymous) mmap() play.

I think it is very unlikely for someone to use malloc'ed pointers with
userfaultfd.

>
> At least we haven't seen any apps do this so far, and the tagged
> pointers feature has been in Android since last year's Android 11
> release. So maybe we can say this is uncommon enough that we can just
> let userspace handle this. So we would do:
>
> 1. Forbid tagged pointers in the ioctl as mentioned above.
> 2. Fix the kselftest (e.g. by untagging the pointer, or making it use
> mmap). A fix would probably be needed here anyway because we noticed
> that the test is later passing a tagged heap pointer to mremap (and
> failing).

The plan looks good to me. Using mmap (instead of posix_memalign)
seems like a cleaner fix to the kselftest as compared to untagging the
pointer everywhere.
>
> I'd be okay with this approach but I'd first like to hear from
> Alistair and/or Lokesh since I think they favored the approach in my
> patch.
>
> Peter