From 7b55851367136b1efd84d98fea81ba57a98304cf Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: David Herrmann Date: Tue, 8 Jan 2019 13:58:52 +0100 Subject: fork: record start_time late This changes the fork(2) syscall to record the process start_time after initializing the basic task structure but still before making the new process visible to user-space. Technically, we could record the start_time anytime during fork(2). But this might lead to scenarios where a start_time is recorded long before a process becomes visible to user-space. For instance, with userfaultfd(2) and TLS, user-space can delay the execution of fork(2) for an indefinite amount of time (and will, if this causes network access, or similar). By recording the start_time late, it much closer reflects the point in time where the process becomes live and can be observed by other processes. Lastly, this makes it much harder for user-space to predict and control the start_time they get assigned. Previously, user-space could fork a process and stall it in copy_thread_tls() before its pid is allocated, but after its start_time is recorded. This can be misused to later-on cycle through PIDs and resume the stalled fork(2) yielding a process that has the same pid and start_time as a process that existed before. This can be used to circumvent security systems that identify processes by their pid+start_time combination. Even though user-space was always aware that start_time recording is flaky (but several projects are known to still rely on start_time-based identification), changing the start_time to be recorded late will help mitigate existing attacks and make it much harder for user-space to control the start_time a process gets assigned. Reported-by: Jann Horn Signed-off-by: Tom Gundersen Signed-off-by: David Herrmann Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds --- kernel/fork.c | 13 +++++++++++-- 1 file changed, 11 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) (limited to 'kernel') diff --git a/kernel/fork.c b/kernel/fork.c index a60459947f18..7f49be94eba9 100644 --- a/kernel/fork.c +++ b/kernel/fork.c @@ -1833,8 +1833,6 @@ static __latent_entropy struct task_struct *copy_process( posix_cpu_timers_init(p); - p->start_time = ktime_get_ns(); - p->real_start_time = ktime_get_boot_ns(); p->io_context = NULL; audit_set_context(p, NULL); cgroup_fork(p); @@ -2000,6 +1998,17 @@ static __latent_entropy struct task_struct *copy_process( if (retval) goto bad_fork_free_pid; + /* + * From this point on we must avoid any synchronous user-space + * communication until we take the tasklist-lock. In particular, we do + * not want user-space to be able to predict the process start-time by + * stalling fork(2) after we recorded the start_time but before it is + * visible to the system. + */ + + p->start_time = ktime_get_ns(); + p->real_start_time = ktime_get_boot_ns(); + /* * Make it visible to the rest of the system, but dont wake it up yet. * Need tasklist lock for parent etc handling! -- cgit v1.2.3