Re: [PATCH] [RFC]arm64:Mark __stack_chk_guard as __ro_after_init

From: ashimida
Date: Tue Sep 14 2021 - 21:57:18 EST


Hi King, Rutland:

Thanks for the reply and let me understand the reason here.

Then may I first submit a patch to modify the attributes of
__stack_chk_guard of the arm/aarch64 platform?

On 9/14/21 6:17 PM, Mark Rutland wrote:
On Tue, Sep 14, 2021 at 05:44:02PM +0800, Dan Li wrote:
__stack_chk_guard is setup once while init stage and never changed
after that.

Although the modification of this variable at runtime will usually
cause the kernel to crash (so dose the attacker), it should be marked
as _ro_after_init, and it should not affect performance if it is
placed in the ro_after_init section.

This should also be the case on the ARM platform, or am I missing
something?

Signed-off-by: Dan Li <ashimida@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

FWIW, this makes sense to me:

Acked-by: Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@xxxxxxx>

Looking at the history, this was added to arm64 in commit:

c0c264ae5112d1cd ("arm64: Add CONFIG_CC_STACKPROTECTOR")

... whereas __ro_after_init was introduced around 2 years later in
commit:

c74ba8b3480da6dd ("arch: Introduce post-init read-only memory")

... so we weren't deliberately avoiding __ro_after_init, and there are
probably a significant number of other variables we could apply it to.

Mark.

---
arch/arm64/kernel/process.c | 2 +-
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/arch/arm64/kernel/process.c b/arch/arm64/kernel/process.c
index c8989b9..c858b85 100644
--- a/arch/arm64/kernel/process.c
+++ b/arch/arm64/kernel/process.c
@@ -60,7 +60,7 @@
#if defined(CONFIG_STACKPROTECTOR) && !defined(CONFIG_STACKPROTECTOR_PER_TASK)
#include <linux/stackprotector.h>
-unsigned long __stack_chk_guard __read_mostly;
+unsigned long __stack_chk_guard __ro_after_init;
EXPORT_SYMBOL(__stack_chk_guard);
#endif
--
2.7.4