Re: [PATCH 0/7] Mitigation against unsafe data speculation (CVE-2017-5753)

["Richard Earnshaw (lists)" <Richard.Earnshaw@arm.com>]

On 10/07/18 08:19, Richard Biener wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 9, 2018 at 6:39 PM Richard Earnshaw
> <Richard.Earnshaw@arm.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> The patches I posted earlier this year for mitigating against
>> CVE-2017-5753 (Spectre variant 1) attracted some useful feedback, from
>> which it became obvious that a rethink was needed.  This mail, and the
>> following patches attempt to address that feedback and present a new
>> approach to mitigating against this form of attack surface.
>>
>> There were two major issues with the original approach:
>>
>> - The speculation bounds were too tightly constrained - essentially
>>   they had to represent and upper and lower bound on a pointer, or a
>>   pointer offset.
>> - The speculation constraints could only cover the immediately preceding
>>   branch, which often did not fit well with the structure of the existing
>>   code.
>>
>> An additional criticism was that the shape of the intrinsic did not
>> fit particularly well with systems that used a single speculation
>> barrier that essentially had to wait until all preceding speculation
>> had to be resolved.
>>
>> To address all of the above, these patches adopt a new approach, based
>> in part on a posting by Chandler Carruth to the LLVM developers list
>> (https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2018-March/122085.html),
>> but which we have extended to deal with inter-function speculation.
>> The patches divide the problem into two halves.
>>
>> The first half is some target-specific code to track the speculation
>> condition through the generated code to provide an internal variable
>> which can tell us whether or not the CPU's control flow speculation
>> matches the data flow calculations.  The idea is that the internal
>> variable starts with the value TRUE and if the CPU's control flow
>> speculation ever causes a jump to the wrong block of code the variable
>> becomes false until such time as the incorrect control flow
>> speculation gets unwound.
>>
>> The second half is that a new intrinsic function is introduced that is
>> much simpler than we had before.  The basic version of the intrinsic
>> is now simply:
>>
>>       T var = __builtin_speculation_safe_value (T unsafe_var);
>>
>> Full details of the syntax can be found in the documentation patch, in
>> patch 1.  In summary, when not speculating the intrinsic returns
>> unsafe_var; when speculating then if it can be shown that the
>> speculative flow has diverged from the intended control flow then zero
>> is returned.  An optional second argument can be used to return an
>> alternative value to zero.  The builtin may cause execution to pause
>> until the speculation state is resolved.
> 
> So a trivial target implementation would be to emit a barrier and then
> it would always return unsafe_var and never zero.  What I don't understand
> fully is what users should do here, thus what the value of ever returning
> "unsafe" is.  Also I wonder why the API is forcing you to single-out a
> special value instead of doing
> 
>  bool safe = __builtin_speculation_safe_value_p (T unsafe_value);
>  if (!safe)
>    /* what now? */
> 
> I'm only guessing that the correct way to handle "unsafe" is basically
> 
>  while (__builtin_speculation_safe_value (val) == 0)
>     ;
> 
> use val, it's now safe

No, a safe version of val is returned, not a bool telling you it is now
safe to use the original.  You must use the sanitized version in future,
not the unprotected version.


So the usage is going to be more like:

val = __builtin_speculation_safe_value (val);  // Overwrite val with a
sanitized version.

You have to use the cleaned up version, the unclean version is still
vulnerable to incorrect speculation.

R.

> 
> that is, the return value is only interesting in sofar as to whether it is equal
> to val or the special value?
> 
> That said, I wonder why we don't hide that details from the user and
> provide a predicate instead.
> 
> Richard.
> 
>> There are seven patches in this set, as follows.
>>
>> 1) Introduces the new intrinsic __builtin_sepculation_safe_value.
>> 2) Adds a basic hard barrier implementation for AArch32 (arm) state.
>> 3) Adds a basic hard barrier implementation for AArch64 state.
>> 4) Adds a new command-line option -mtrack-speculation (currently a no-op).
>> 5) Disables CB[N]Z and TB[N]Z when -mtrack-speculation.
>> 6) Adds the new speculation tracking pass for AArch64
>> 7) Uses the new speculation tracking pass to generate CSDB-based barrier
>>    sequences
>>
>> I haven't added a speculation-tracking pass for AArch32 at this time.
>> It is possible to do this, but would require quite a lot of rework for
>> the arm backend due to the limited number of registers that are
>> available.
>>
>> Although patch 6 is AArch64 specific, I'd appreciate a review from
>> someone more familiar with the branch edge code than myself.  There
>> appear to be a number of tricky issues with more complex edges so I'd
>> like a second opinion on that code in case I've missed an important
>> case.
>>
>> R.
>>
>>
>>
>> Richard Earnshaw (7):
>>   Add __builtin_speculation_safe_value
>>   Arm - add speculation_barrier pattern
>>   AArch64 - add speculation barrier
>>   AArch64 - Add new option -mtrack-speculation
>>   AArch64 - disable CB[N]Z TB[N]Z when tracking speculation
>>   AArch64 - new pass to add conditional-branch speculation tracking
>>   AArch64 - use CSDB based sequences if speculation tracking is enabled
>>
>>  gcc/builtin-types.def                     |   6 +
>>  gcc/builtins.c                            |  57 ++++
>>  gcc/builtins.def                          |  20 ++
>>  gcc/c-family/c-common.c                   | 143 +++++++++
>>  gcc/c-family/c-cppbuiltin.c               |   5 +-
>>  gcc/config.gcc                            |   2 +-
>>  gcc/config/aarch64/aarch64-passes.def     |   1 +
>>  gcc/config/aarch64/aarch64-protos.h       |   3 +-
>>  gcc/config/aarch64/aarch64-speculation.cc | 494 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>>  gcc/config/aarch64/aarch64.c              |  88 +++++-
>>  gcc/config/aarch64/aarch64.md             | 140 ++++++++-
>>  gcc/config/aarch64/aarch64.opt            |   4 +
>>  gcc/config/aarch64/iterators.md           |   3 +
>>  gcc/config/aarch64/t-aarch64              |  10 +
>>  gcc/config/arm/arm.md                     |  21 ++
>>  gcc/config/arm/unspecs.md                 |   1 +
>>  gcc/doc/cpp.texi                          |   4 +
>>  gcc/doc/extend.texi                       |  29 ++
>>  gcc/doc/invoke.texi                       |  10 +-
>>  gcc/doc/md.texi                           |  15 +
>>  gcc/doc/tm.texi                           |  20 ++
>>  gcc/doc/tm.texi.in                        |   2 +
>>  gcc/target.def                            |  23 ++
>>  gcc/targhooks.c                           |  27 ++
>>  gcc/targhooks.h                           |   2 +
>>  gcc/testsuite/gcc.dg/spec-barrier-1.c     |  40 +++
>>  gcc/testsuite/gcc.dg/spec-barrier-2.c     |  19 ++
>>  gcc/testsuite/gcc.dg/spec-barrier-3.c     |  13 +
>>  28 files changed, 1191 insertions(+), 11 deletions(-)
>>  create mode 100644 gcc/config/aarch64/aarch64-speculation.cc
>>  create mode 100644 gcc/testsuite/gcc.dg/spec-barrier-1.c
>>  create mode 100644 gcc/testsuite/gcc.dg/spec-barrier-2.c
>>  create mode 100644 gcc/testsuite/gcc.dg/spec-barrier-3.c