Re: [PATCH 0/2] tracing: Detect unsafe dereferencing of pointers from trace events

From: Steven Rostedt
Date: Sat Feb 27 2021 - 19:22:24 EST



[ Resending with an address that should work for Felipe ]

On Sat, 27 Feb 2021 14:18:02 -0500
Steven Rostedt <rostedt@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Fri, 26 Feb 2021 14:21:00 -0800
> Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > On Fri, Feb 26, 2021 at 11:07 AM Steven Rostedt <rostedt@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >
> > > The first patch scans the print fmts of the trace events looking for
> > > dereferencing pointers from %p*, and making sure that they refer back
> > > to the trace event itself.
> > >
> > > The second patch handles strings "%s" [..]
> >
> > Doing this at runtime really feels like the wrong thing to do.
> >
> > It won't even protect us from what happened - people like me and
> > Andrew won't even run those tracepoints in the first place, so we
> > won't notice.
> >
> > It really would be much better in every respect to have this done by
> > checkpatch, I think.
>
> And after fixing the parsing to not trigger false positives, an
> allyesconfig boot found this:
>
> event cdns3_gadget_giveback has unsafe dereference of argument 11
> print_fmt: "%s: req: %p, req buff %p, length: %u/%u %s%s%s, status: %d, trb: [start:%d, end:%d: virt addr %pa], flags:%x SID: %u", __get_str(name), REC->req, REC->buf,
> REC->actual, REC->length, REC->zero ? "Z" : "z", REC->short_not_ok ? "S" : "s", REC->no_interrupt ? "I" : "i", REC->status, REC->start_trb, REC->end_trb, REC->start_trb_addr, REC->flags, RE
> C->stream_id
>
> (as the above is from a trace event class, it triggered for every event
> in that class).
>
> As it looks like it uses %pa which IIUC from the printk code, it
> dereferences the pointer to find it's virtual address. The event has
> this as the field:
>
> __field(struct cdns3_trb *, start_trb_addr)
>
> Assigns it with:
>
> __entry->start_trb_addr = req->trb;
>
> And prints that with %pa, which will dereference pointer at the time of
> reading, where the address in question may no longer be around. That
> looks to me as a potential bug.
>
> [ Cc'd the people responsible for that code. ]
>
> -- Steve