Re: [PATCH v7 02/39] prctl: arch-agnostic prctl for shadow stack

[Mark Brown]

On Tue, Dec 12, 2023 at 04:50:38PM -0800, Deepak Gupta wrote:

> A theoretical scenario (no current workloads should've this case
> because no shadow stack)

> - User mode did _ENABLE on the main thread. Shadow stack was allocated
> for the current
>   thread.
> - User mode created a bunch worker threads to run untrusted contained
> code. They shadow
>   stack too.
> - main thread had to do dlopen and now need to disable shadow stack on
> itself due to
>   incompatibility of incoming object in address space.
> - main thread controls worker threads and knows they're contained and
> should still be running
>   with a shadow stack. Although once in a while the main thread needs
> to perform writes to a shadow
>   stack of worker threads for some fixup (in the same addr space).
> main thread doesn't want to delegate
>   this responsibility of ss writes to worker threads because they're untrusted.

> How will it do that (currently _ENABLE is married to _WRITE and _PUSH) ?

That's feeling moderately firmly into "don't do that" territory to be
honest, the problems of trying to modify the stack of another running
thread while it's active just don't seem worth it - if you're
coordinating enough to do the modifications it's probably possible to
just ask the thread who's stack is being modified to do the modification
itself and having an unprotected thread writing into shadow stack memory
doesn't feel great.

That said in terms of the API there would be nothing stopping us saying
that _WRITE by itself is a valid combination of flags, in which case the
thread would have permission to write to any shadow stack memory it
could get to.  For arm64 I think we can implement that, I'm not sure
about x86.  _PUSH without _ENABLE is a lot less clear, you would at the
very least at some point have had a stack enabled to have a stack
pointer.

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