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authorMarco Elver <elver@google.com>2024-08-05 14:39:39 +0200
committerAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>2024-09-02 05:26:03 +0200
commitcc0a0f98553528791ae33ba5ee8c118b52ae2028 (patch)
tree828825e5711cf8a8cce2e3033238ec778b079922 /Documentation/dev-tools
parentmm: fix (harmless) type confusion in lock_vma_under_rcu() (diff)
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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>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/dev-tools')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/dev-tools/kfence.rst7
1 files changed, 7 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/dev-tools/kfence.rst b/Documentation/dev-tools/kfence.rst
index 936f6aaa75c8..541899353865 100644
--- a/Documentation/dev-tools/kfence.rst
+++ b/Documentation/dev-tools/kfence.rst
@@ -53,6 +53,13 @@ configurable via the Kconfig option ``CONFIG_KFENCE_DEFERRABLE``.
The KUnit test suite is very likely to fail when using a deferrable timer
since it currently causes very unpredictable sample intervals.
+By default KFENCE will only sample 1 heap allocation within each sample
+interval. *Burst mode* allows to sample successive heap allocations, where the
+kernel boot parameter ``kfence.burst`` can be set to a non-zero value which
+denotes the *additional* successive allocations within a sample interval;
+setting ``kfence.burst=N`` means that ``1 + N`` successive allocations are
+attempted through KFENCE for each sample interval.
+
The KFENCE memory pool is of fixed size, and if the pool is exhausted, no
further KFENCE allocations occur. With ``CONFIG_KFENCE_NUM_OBJECTS`` (default
255), the number of available guarded objects can be controlled. Each object