[PATCH] D54896: Introduce control flow speculation tracking pass for AArch64.

Mon Nov 26 06:25:08 PST 2018

kristof.beyls created this revision.
kristof.beyls added a reviewer: olista01.
Herald added subscribers: jfb, javed.absar, mgorny.

The pass implements tracking of control flow miss-speculation into a "taint"
register. That taint register can then be used to mask off registers with
sensitive data when executing under miss-speculation, a.k.a. "transient
execution".

At the moment, it implements the tracking of miss-speculation of control
flow into a taint register, but doesn't implement a mechanism yet to then
use that taint register to mask of vulnerable data in registers (something
for a follow-on improvement). Possible strategies to mask out vulnerable
data that can be implemented on top of this are:

- speculative load hardening to automatically mask of data loaded in registers.
- using intrinsics to mask of data in registers as indicated by the programmer (see https://lwn.net/Articles/759423/).

For AArch64, the following implementation choices have been made in this patch.
Some of these are different than the implementation choices made in
the similar pass implemented in X86SpeculativeLoadHardening.cpp, as
the instruction set characteristics result in different trade-offs.

- The speculation hardening is done after register allocation. With a relative abundance of registers, one register is reserved (X16) to be the taint register. X16 is expected to not clash with other register reservation mechanisms with very high probability because: . The AArch64 ABI doesn't guarantee X16 to be retained across any call. . There currently isn't even a user interface to reserve X16. If needed, the choice of register to reserve could be made flexible on a per function basis.
- It is easy to insert mask operations at this late stage as we have mask operations available that don't set flags.
- The taint variable contains all-ones when no miss-speculation is detected, and contains all-zeros when miss-speculation is detected. Therefore, when masking, an AND instruction (which only changes the register to be masked, no other side effects) can easily be inserted anywhere that's needed.
- The tracking of miss-speculation is done by using a data-flow conditional select instruction (CSEL) to evaluate the flags that were also used to make conditional branch direction decisions. Speculation of the CSEL instruction can be limited with a CSDB instruction - so the combination of CSEL + a later CSDB gives the guarantee that the flags as used in the CSEL aren't speculated. When conditional branch direction gets miss-speculated, the semantics of the inserted CSEL instruction is such that the taint register will contain all zero bits. One key requirement for this to work is that the conditional branch is followed by an execution of the CSEL instruction, where the CSEL instruction needs to use the same flags status as the conditional branch. This means that the conditional branches must not be implemented as one of the AArch64 conditional branches that do not use the flags as input (CB(N)Z and TB(N)Z). This is implemented by ensuring in the instruction selectors to not produce these instructions when speculation hardening is enabled. This pass will assert if it does encounter such an instruction.
- On function call boundaries, the miss-speculation state is transferred from the taint register X16 to be encoded in the SP register as value 0.

Future extensions/improvements could be:

- Implement this functionality using full speculation barriers, akin to the x86-slh-lfence option. This may be more useful for the intrinsics-based approach than for the SLH approach to masking.
- No indirect branch misprediction gets protected/instrumented; but this could be done for some indirect branches, such as switch jump tables.

I'm still working on a follow on patch that builds on top of this to introduce
speculative load hardening. Nonetheless, I wanted to get this out already to
start collecting feedback (and split up the functionality into smaller parts to
make it easier to review).
I'm more busy than usual in the coming 2 weeks, so may be a bit slow to react
to review feedback, I'm afraid.

https://reviews.llvm.org/D54896

Files:
  lib/Target/AArch64/AArch64.h
  lib/Target/AArch64/AArch64FastISel.cpp
  lib/Target/AArch64/AArch64ISelLowering.cpp
  lib/Target/AArch64/AArch64InstructionSelector.cpp
  lib/Target/AArch64/AArch64RegisterInfo.cpp
  lib/Target/AArch64/AArch64SpeculationHardening.cpp
  lib/Target/AArch64/AArch64TargetMachine.cpp
  lib/Target/AArch64/CMakeLists.txt
  test/CodeGen/AArch64/O0-pipeline.ll
  test/CodeGen/AArch64/O3-pipeline.ll
  test/CodeGen/AArch64/speculation-hardening.ll
  test/CodeGen/AArch64/speculation-hardening.mir

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