bpf: Simplify checking size of helper accesses

This patch simplifies the verification of size arguments associated to
pointer arguments to helpers and kfuncs. Many helpers take a pointer
argument followed by the size of the memory access performed to be
performed through that pointer. Before this patch, the handling of the
size argument in check_mem_size_reg() was confusing and wasteful: if the
size register's lower bound was 0, then the verification was done twice:
once considering the size of the access to be the lower-bound of the
respective argument, and once considering the upper bound (even if the
two are the same). The upper bound checking is a super-set of the
lower-bound checking(*), except: the only point of the lower-bound check
is to handle the case where zero-sized-accesses are explicitly not
allowed and the lower-bound is zero. This static condition is now
checked explicitly, replacing a much more complex, expensive and
confusing verification call to check_helper_mem_access().

Error messages change in this patch. Before, messages about illegal
zero-size accesses depended on the type of the pointer and on other
conditions, and sometimes the message was plain wrong: in some tests
that changed you'll see that the old message was something like "R1 min
value is outside of the allowed memory range", where R1 is the pointer
register; the error was wrongly claiming that the pointer was bad
instead of the size being bad. Other times the information that the size
came for a register with a possible range of values was wrong, and the
error presented the size as a fixed zero. Now the errors refer to the
right register. However, the old error messages did contain useful
information about the pointer register which is now lost; recovering
this information was deemed not important enough.

(*) Besides standing to reason that the checks for a bigger size access
are a super-set of the checks for a smaller size access, I have also
mechanically verified this by reading the code for all types of
pointers. I could convince myself that it's true for all but
PTR_TO_BTF_ID (check_ptr_to_btf_access). There, simply looking
line-by-line does not immediately prove what we want. If anyone has any
qualms, let me know.

Signed-off-by: Andrei Matei <andreimatei1@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrii Nakryiko <andrii@kernel.org>
Acked-by: Andrii Nakryiko <andrii@kernel.org>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/20231221232225.568730-2-andreimatei1@gmail.com

1 files changed, 4 insertions, 6 deletions

diff --git a/kernel/bpf/verifier.c b/kernel/bpf/verifier.c
index a376eb609c41..d4e31f61de0e 100644
--- a/kernel/bpf/verifier.c
+++ b/kernel/bpf/verifier.c
@@ -7279,12 +7279,10 @@ static int check_mem_size_reg(struct bpf_verifier_env *env,
 		return -EACCES;
 	}
 
-	if (reg->umin_value == 0) {
-		err = check_helper_mem_access(env, regno - 1, 0,
-					      zero_size_allowed,
-					      meta);
-		if (err)
-			return err;
+	if (reg->umin_value == 0 && !zero_size_allowed) {
+		verbose(env, "R%d invalid zero-sized read: u64=[%lld,%lld]\n",
+			regno, reg->umin_value, reg->umax_value);
+		return -EACCES;
 	}
 
 	if (reg->umax_value >= BPF_MAX_VAR_SIZ) {