angler-fishThe Vulnerability History Project

bpf: Fix leakage under speculation on mispredicted branches

      The verifier only enumerates valid control-flow paths and skips paths that
are unreachable in the non-speculative domain. And so it can miss issues
under speculative execution on mispredicted branches.

For example, a type confusion has been demonstrated with the following
crafted program:

  // r0 = pointer to a map array entry
  // r6 = pointer to readable stack slot
  // r9 = scalar controlled by attacker
  1: r0 = *(u64 *)(r0) // cache miss
  2: if r0 != 0x0 goto line 4
  3: r6 = r9
  4: if r0 != 0x1 goto line 6
  5: r9 = *(u8 *)(r6)
  6: // leak r9

Since line 3 runs iff r0 == 0 and line 5 runs iff r0 == 1, the verifier
concludes that the pointer dereference on line 5 is safe. But: if the
attacker trains both the branches to fall-through, such that the following
is speculatively executed ...

  r6 = r9
  r9 = *(u8 *)(r6)
  // leak r9

... then the program will dereference an attacker-controlled value and could
leak its co
    
commit 9183671af6dbf60a1219371d4ed73e23f43b49db
+40 -4
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