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The STACKLEAK feature (initially developed by PaX Team) has the following benefits: 1. Reduces the information that can be revealed through kernel stack leak bugs. The idea of erasing the thread stack at the end of syscalls is similar to CONFIG_PAGE_POISONING and memzero_explicit() in kernel crypto, which all comply with FDP_RIP.2 (Full Residual Information Protection) of the Common Criteria standard. 2. Blocks some uninitialized stack variable attacks (e.g. CVE-2017-17712, CVE-2010-2963). That kind of bugs should be killed by improving C compilers in future, which might take a long time. This commit introduces the code filling the used part of the kernel stack with a poison value before returning to userspace. Full STACKLEAK feature also contains the gcc plugin which comes in a separate commit. The STACKLEAK feature is ported from grsecurity/PaX. More information at: https://grsecurity.net/ https://pax.grsecurity.net/ This code is modified from Brad Spengler/PaX Team's code in the last public patch of grsecurity/PaX based on our understanding of the code. Changes or omissions from the original code are ours and don't reflect the original grsecurity/PaX code. Performance impact: Hardware: Intel Core i7-4770, 16 GB RAM Test #1: building the Linux kernel on a single core 0.91% slowdown Test #2: hackbench -s 4096 -l 2000 -g 15 -f 25 -P 4.2% slowdown So the STACKLEAK description in Kconfig includes: "The tradeoff is the performance impact: on a single CPU system kernel compilation sees a 1% slowdown, other systems and workloads may vary and you are advised to test this feature on your expected workload before deploying it". Signed-off-by: Alexander Popov <alex.popov@linux.com> Acked-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> Reviewed-by: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com> Acked-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
See Documentation/00-INDEX for a list of what is contained in each file.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.