Re: [iovisor-dev] [PATCH v3 net-next 02/12] bpf/verifier: rework value tracking

[Edward Cree]

On 12/07/17 23:07, Nadav Amit wrote:
> Edward Cree <ecree@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> In this specific case, there was a bug before: if (say) src and dst were
>> both unknown bytes (so range 0 to 255), it would compute the new min and max
>> to be 0, so it would think the result is known to be 0.  But that's wrong,
>> because it could be anything from -255 to +255.  The bug's implications are
>> that it could be used to construct an out-of-range offset to (say) a map
>> pointer which the verifier would think was in-range and thus accept.
> This sounds like a serious bug that may need to be backported to stable
> versions, no? In this case I would assume it should be in a separate patch
> so it could be applied separately.
Having looked deeper into this in attempting to create a test that the existing
 verifier would fail, it turns out that in the existing verifier that BPF_SUB
 handling is dead code.  If (for instance) we subtract an UNKNOWN_VALUE from a
 PTR_TO_MAP_VALUE_ADJ, that code will be run, but afterwards we will
 mark_reg_unknown_value() the register (bottom of check_alu_op()) making our
 previous min/max determination irrelevant.
So there's nothing to backport, and if I did change this in its own patch,
 there'd be no way to test it.  (I have, however, added a test covering this
 codepath in the new verifier.)

-Ed