public inbox for libc-ports@sourceware.org
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
* ARM per-thread stack protector
@ 2013-07-19 16:34 Will Newton
  2013-07-19 21:41 ` Roland McGrath
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 4+ messages in thread
From: Will Newton @ 2013-07-19 16:34 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: libc-ports

Hi all,

I've been looking into implementing pre-thread stack protector
canaries for ARM and I would be interested in people's opinions on
whether I have understood it correctly.

At the moment the global canary value is stored in __stack_chk_guard
which is exported by glibc and accesses to this variable are emitted
by gcc if it detects a capable glibc version at configure time.

glibc with per-thread stack canary values does not export
__stack_chk_guard but adds an element to the TCB to contain the
per-thread value and gcc emits TP-relative accesses to load this
value.

Implementing the per-thread scheme would therefore seem to me to break
ABI compatibility and cause problems when mixing gcc and glibc
versions:

Old gcc, old glibc: OK
Old gcc, new glibc: __stack_chk_guard is missing, link time failure.
New gcc, old glibc: stack canary value is loaded from uninitialized
TCB area, security issue.
New gcc, new glibc: OK.

It should be possible to add support for both schemes at the same time
in glibc, exporting __stack_chk_guard at the same time as supporting
per-thread canary values, which would fix the "old gcc, new glibc"
case.

I am not sure if there is a good fix for "new gcc, old glibc",
although gcc configure could be taught about glibc versions and do the
right thing for each.

Or is there a simpler way to handle this? Has any other architecture
implemented per-thread stack protector after already supporting the
simpler scheme?

Thanks,

--
Will Newton
Toolchain Working Group, Linaro

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 4+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2013-07-22 22:01 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 4+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2013-07-19 16:34 ARM per-thread stack protector Will Newton
2013-07-19 21:41 ` Roland McGrath
2013-07-22  9:15   ` Will Newton
2013-07-22 22:01     ` Roland McGrath

This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for read-only IMAP folder(s) and NNTP newsgroup(s).