[PATCH v5 7/7] ARM: vdso: Mark vDSO code as read-only

From: Kees Cook
Date: Wed Feb 17 2016 - 17:43:42 EST


From: David Brown <david.brown@xxxxxxxxxx>

Although the arm vDSO is cleanly separated by code/data with the code
being read-only in userspace mappings, the code page is still writable
from the kernel. There have been exploits (such as
http://itszn.com/blog/?p=21) that take advantage of this on x86 to go
from a bad kernel write to full root.

Prevent this specific exploit on arm by putting the vDSO code page in
post-init read-only memory as well.

Before:
vdso: 1 text pages at base 80927000
root@Vexpress:/ cat /sys/kernel/debug/kernel_page_tables
---[ Modules ]---
---[ Kernel Mapping ]---
0x80000000-0x80100000 1M RW NX SHD
0x80100000-0x80600000 5M ro x SHD
0x80600000-0x80800000 2M ro NX SHD
0x80800000-0xbe000000 984M RW NX SHD

After:
vdso: 1 text pages at base 8072b000
root@Vexpress:/ cat /sys/kernel/debug/kernel_page_tables
---[ Modules ]---
---[ Kernel Mapping ]---
0x80000000-0x80100000 1M RW NX SHD
0x80100000-0x80600000 5M ro x SHD
0x80600000-0x80800000 2M ro NX SHD
0x80800000-0xbe000000 984M RW NX SHD

Inspired by https://lkml.org/lkml/2016/1/19/494 based on work by the
PaX Team, Brad Spengler, and Kees Cook.

Signed-off-by: David Brown <david.brown@xxxxxxxxxx>
Acked-by: Kees Cook <keescook@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
---
arch/arm/vdso/vdso.S | 3 +--
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 2 deletions(-)

diff --git a/arch/arm/vdso/vdso.S b/arch/arm/vdso/vdso.S
index b2b97e3e7bab..a62a7b64f49c 100644
--- a/arch/arm/vdso/vdso.S
+++ b/arch/arm/vdso/vdso.S
@@ -23,9 +23,8 @@
#include <linux/const.h>
#include <asm/page.h>

- __PAGE_ALIGNED_DATA
-
.globl vdso_start, vdso_end
+ .section .data..ro_after_init
.balign PAGE_SIZE
vdso_start:
.incbin "arch/arm/vdso/vdso.so"
--
2.6.3