kfence: introduce burst mode
authorMarco Elver <elver@google.com>
Mon, 5 Aug 2024 12:39:39 +0000 (14:39 +0200)
committerAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Mon, 2 Sep 2024 03:26:03 +0000 (20:26 -0700)
commitcc0a0f98553528791ae33ba5ee8c118b52ae2028
tree828825e5711cf8a8cce2e3033238ec778b079922
parent17fe833b0de08a78bfb51388e0615969d73ea8ad
kfence: introduce burst mode

Introduce burst mode, which can be configured with kfence.burst=$count,
where the burst count denotes the additional successive slab allocations
to be allocated through KFENCE for each sample interval.

The idea is that this can give developers an additional knob to make
KFENCE more aggressive when debugging specific issues of systems where
either rebooting or recompiling the kernel with KASAN is not possible.

Experiment: To assess the effectiveness of the new option, we randomly
picked a recent out-of-bounds [1] and use-after-free bug [2], each with a
reproducer provided by syzbot, that initially detected these bugs with
KASAN.  We then tried to reproduce the bugs with KFENCE below.

[1] Fixed by: 7c55b78818cf ("jfs: xattr: fix buffer overflow for invalid xattr")
    https://syzkaller.appspot.com/bug?id=9d1b59d4718239da6f6069d3891863c25f9f24a2
[2] Fixed by: f8ad00f3fb2a ("l2tp: fix possible UAF when cleaning up tunnels")
    https://syzkaller.appspot.com/bug?id=4f34adc84f4a3b080187c390eeef60611fd450e1

The following KFENCE configs were compared. A pool size of 1023 objects
was used for all configurations.

Baseline
kfence.sample_interval=100
kfence.skip_covered_thresh=75
kfence.burst=0

Aggressive
kfence.sample_interval=1
kfence.skip_covered_thresh=10
kfence.burst=0

AggressiveBurst
kfence.sample_interval=1
kfence.skip_covered_thresh=10
kfence.burst=1000

Each reproducer was run 10 times (after a fresh reboot), with the
following detection counts for each KFENCE config:

                    | Detection Count out of 10 |
                    |    OOB [1]  |    UAF [2]  |
  ------------------+-------------+-------------+
  Default           |     0/10    |     0/10    |
  Aggressive        |     0/10    |     0/10    |
  AggressiveBurst   |     8/10    |     8/10    |

With the Default and even the Aggressive configs the results are
unsurprising, given KFENCE has not been designed for deterministic bug
detection of small test cases.

However, when enabling burst mode with relatively large burst count,
KFENCE can start to detect heap memory-safety bugs even in simpler test
cases with high probability (in the above cases with ~80% probability).

Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20240805124203.2692278-1-elver@google.com
Signed-off-by: Marco Elver <elver@google.com>
Reviewed-by: Alexander Potapenko <glider@google.com>
Cc: Andrey Konovalov <andreyknvl@gmail.com>
Cc: Dmitry Vyukov <dvyukov@google.com>
Cc: Jann Horn <jannh@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Documentation/dev-tools/kfence.rst
include/linux/kfence.h
mm/kfence/core.c