Re: [PATCH] mm/mmap: Map MAP_STACK to VM_STACK

From: Matthew Wilcox
Date: Tue Apr 18 2023 - 23:47:01 EST


On Tue, Apr 18, 2023 at 09:16:37PM -0400, Waiman Long wrote:
>  1) App runs creating lots of threads.
>  2) It mmap's 256K pages of anonymous memory.
>  3) It writes executable code to that memory.
>  4) It calls mprotect() with PROT_EXEC on that memory so
>     it can subsequently execute the code.
>
> The above mprotect() will fail if the mmap'd region's VMA gets merged with
> the VMA for one of the thread stacks.  That's because the default RHEL
> SELinux policy is to not allow executable stacks.

By the way, this is a daft policy. The policy you really want is
EXEC|WRITE is not allowed. A non-writable stack is useless, so it's
actually a superset of your current policy. Forbidding _simultaneous_
write and executable is just good programming. This way, you don't need
to care about the underlying VMA's current permissions, you just need
to do:

if ((prot & (PROT_EXEC|PROT_WRITE)) == (PROT_EXEC|PROT_WRITE))
return -EACCESS;