Re: [PATCH] drm/amdgpu/pm: Fix potential Spectre v1

From: Alex Deucher
Date: Mon Jul 30 2018 - 16:14:31 EST


On Mon, Jul 30, 2018 at 5:55 AM, Michel DÃnzer <michel@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 2018-07-24 10:53 PM, Alex Deucher wrote:
>> On Mon, Jul 23, 2018 at 12:32 PM, Gustavo A. R. Silva
>> <gustavo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> idx can be indirectly controlled by user-space, hence leading to a
>>> potential exploitation of the Spectre variant 1 vulnerability.
>>>
>>> This issue was detected with the help of Smatch:
>>>
>>> drivers/gpu/drm/amd/amdgpu/amdgpu_pm.c:408 amdgpu_set_pp_force_state()
>>> warn: potential spectre issue 'data.states'
>>>
>>> Fix this by sanitizing idx before using it to index data.states
>>
>> Is this actually necessary? We already check that idx is valid a few
>> lines before:
>> if (ret || idx >= ARRAY_SIZE(data.states)) {
>> count = -EINVAL;
>> goto fail;
>> }
>
> A Spectre attack would be based on idx ending up too large, but the CPU
> speculatively executing the following code assuming idx <
> ARRAY_SIZE(data.states), and extracting information from the incorrectly
> speculated code via side channels.
>
> I'm not sure if that's actually possible in this case, but better safe
> than sorry?

Yeah, I'm not sure. I guess this can't hurt.

Alex