[PATCH v2 3/4] x86/signal: Prevent an alternate stack overflow before a signal delivery

[Jann Horn]

On Thu, Nov 19, 2020 at 8:40 PM Chang S. Bae <chang.seok.bae@intel.com> wrote:
> The kernel pushes data on the userspace stack when entering a signal. If
> using a sigaltstack(), the kernel precisely knows the user stack size.
>
> When the kernel knows that the user stack is too small, avoid the overflow
> and do an immediate SIGSEGV instead.
>
> This overflow is known to occur on systems with large XSAVE state. The
> effort to increase the size typically used for altstacks reduces the
> frequency of these overflows, but this approach is still useful for legacy
> binaries.
>
> Here the kernel expects a bit conservative stack size (for 64-bit apps).
> Legacy binaries used a too-small sigaltstack would be already overflowed
> before this change, if they run on modern hardware.
[...]
> diff --git a/arch/x86/kernel/signal.c b/arch/x86/kernel/signal.c
> index ee6f1ceaa7a2..cee41d684dc2 100644
> --- a/arch/x86/kernel/signal.c
> +++ b/arch/x86/kernel/signal.c
> @@ -251,8 +251,13 @@ get_sigframe(struct k_sigaction *ka, struct pt_regs *regs, size_t frame_size,
>
>         /* This is the X/Open sanctioned signal stack switching.  */
>         if (ka->sa.sa_flags & SA_ONSTACK) {
> -               if (sas_ss_flags(sp) == 0)
> +               if (sas_ss_flags(sp) == 0) {
> +                       /* If the altstack might overflow, die with SIGSEGV: */
> +                       if (!altstack_size_ok(current))
> +                               return (void __user *)-1L;
> +
>                         sp = current->sas_ss_sp + current->sas_ss_size;
> +               }

A couple lines further down, we have this (since commit 14fc9fbc700d):

        /*
         * If we are on the alternate signal stack and would overflow it, don't.
         * Return an always-bogus address instead so we will die with SIGSEGV.
         */
        if (onsigstack && !likely(on_sig_stack(sp)))
                return (void __user *)-1L;

Is that not working?


(It won't handle the case where the kernel fills up almost all of the
alternate stack, and the userspace signal handler then overflows out
of the alternate signal stack. But there isn't much the kernel can do
about that...)