[PATCH] D16599: ELF: Define another entry point.

Tue Feb 2 12:00:24 PST 2016

On Tue, Feb 2, 2016 at 11:44 AM, David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, Feb 2, 2016 at 11:36 AM, Rui Ueyama <ruiu at google.com> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Feb 2, 2016 at 11:07 AM, David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Tue, Feb 2, 2016 at 10:59 AM, Rui Ueyama <ruiu at google.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Tue, Feb 2, 2016 at 8:44 AM, David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On Mon, Feb 1, 2016 at 11:05 PM, Sean Silva via llvm-commits <
>>>>> llvm-commits at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On Mon, Feb 1, 2016 at 12:27 PM, Rui Ueyama <ruiu at google.com> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Even if a file is technically sane, you can craft a malicious one;
>>>>>>> for example, you can probably crash the linker by OOM by setting a very
>>>>>>> large number as an alignment requirement for each section so that the size
>>>>>>> of output becomes huge. It is easily doable using assembly. So my answer
>>>>>>> is "any clang or gcc produced .o not including inline asm". (It does not
>>>>>>> mean that we do not try to recover from errors caused by bad assembly code,
>>>>>>> but we don't/can't guarantee 100% recovery.)
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> You can probably find some way to set the alignment using an
>>>>>> attribute or whatever even from clang (and without inlineasm).
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I don't think there is a platonically-ideal answer for this. It's
>>>>>> more about goals:
>>>>>> - as a command line tool, we don't want legitimate users to see us
>>>>>> crashing during normal use (if a user is intentionally trying to kill LLD,
>>>>>> it is not as embarrassing though, so we don't need to worry much about that
>>>>>> case).
>>>>>> - we want to be useful (someday) as a library that can be safely used
>>>>>> in-process, so we need to provide certain guarantees (but these are not
>>>>>> hugely constraining, because we can assume that the calling code is
>>>>>> programmatically generating the file in good faith).
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> I don't think this is a valid assumption for all programmatic users (&
>>>>> indeed Clang and LLVM both have ways of accepting untrusted inputs - the
>>>>> assumption in LLVM is "if it's not already in the in-memory representation,
>>>>> it's not trusted" (parsing bitcode, reading files, etc) and I think the
>>>>> same would probably be reasonable in lld - callers with object contents in
>>>>> memory (or even a higher level representation - the same as the difference
>>>>> between LLVM IR and LLVM bitcode in a memory buffer) can choose to have lld
>>>>> assume validity (if they produced it from an API they trust/are willing to
>>>>> bugfix if it's ever wrong) or ask for verification (if they got the object
>>>>> over a network connection or other untrusted source (perhaps read it out of
>>>>> a compressed archive, etc))). An API integration of LLD into the Clang
>>>>> driver wouldn't be a sound place to make this assumption - some objects may
>>>>> be passed to Clang (not generated by it) from some other compilation or
>>>>> source, for example.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> The difference is we do not have an in-memory representation of object
>>>> files, or we are using mmap'ed ELF files as the internal representation.
>>>> So, if files are not not trustworthy, you can not make any assumption on
>>>> the data you are handling throughout the program execution time. That's
>>>> probably too hostile environment and doing error check on the way would be
>>>> error-prone, slow, or complicate the code.
>>>>
>>>
>>> I'm not sure I believe that's the case (that it's necessarily
>>> slow/complicated/error-prone) anymore than Clang is - it has untrusted
>>> inputs & has to handle all the possible ways people can write incorrect
>>> source code. (& LLVM too, but, yes - it often gets trusted input in-memory,
>>> but once it goes to disk, LTO for example, verifies it every time - in the
>>> same way I would expect a linker to do so for object files off disk)
>>>
>>>
>>>> If we use an analogy of Clang and LLVM, we probably want to have a
>>>> separate verifier for object files which you can run on object files from
>>>> untrusted source before passing it to the link() function (so, although the
>>>> two are in the same format, untrusted ELF files are "external
>>>> representation", and verified ELF files are "internal representation").
>>>>
>>>
>>> *nod* but I'm suggesting if it's from disk it's untrusted (at least
>>> that's how LTO, LLVM, and Clang work) & since that's the majority case for
>>> a linker, that it's likely to be the case we care about for API use and for
>>> performance. LLVM's JIT is the sort of case I imagine having "trusted"
>>> inputs - generated in memory by a trusted API, any time the generation and
>>> consumption disagree on validity it would be considered a programmer error
>>> and fixed as a bug in the program as a whole (by fixing producer or
>>> consumer). (such a JIT would also have untrusted inputs it would read from
>>> the filesystem too, no doubt - predefined libraries to link in, etc)
>>>
>>
>> There may be a way to handle all possible inputs all the way throughout
>> the linker execution time, but I think that the discussion went a bit too
>> far. We have a number of good patches (which I hoped) that at least stop
>> linker from exiting as long as inputs are not malicious or corrupted, and I
>> expect that should work at least a transient, and submitting them doesn't
>> prevent us from doing more in future if we need to. Can you give us time to
>> work on stuff that's not directly related to this topic?
>>
>
> Sure - didn't mean to rush anyone, was just saying "I don't think this is
> an entire answer/where we want to be long-term" (the tone of the
> conversation/some of the statements seemed to sound like "this addresses
> the issue, we wouldn't need to do anything else for API users & anything
> else would include hardening LLD" - I think it will be necessary to be
> API-usable for untrusted inputs even for fairly basic uses and that
> security level hardening doesn't have to be the goal as soon as we step
> into this area)
>
> Just trying to be clear, so that if, 6 months from now, the topic comes up
> again there's not another round of confusion over what's
> reasonable/intended/in-scope or out of scope.
>

For the record, I didn't agree that we absolutely have to handle files read
from disk as untrusted. I agree that that's a good thing, and I promise I
will make a reasonable effort, but that is not a conclusion of this thread.
(I'm sorry to be defensive saying, but I'm afraid that if we come back 6
months from now, it would have looked like a conclusion of this thread.)

>>
>>> - David
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>> -- Sean Silva
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On Mon, Feb 1, 2016 at 12:11 PM, Rafael Espíndola <
>>>>>>> rafael.espindola at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> On 1 February 2016 at 15:06, Rui Ueyama <ruiu at google.com> wrote:
>>>>>>>> > On Mon, Feb 1, 2016 at 11:57 AM, Rafael Espíndola
>>>>>>>> > <rafael.espindola at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>>> >>
>>>>>>>> >> On 1 February 2016 at 14:46, Sean Silva <chisophugis at gmail.com>
>>>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>>> >> > I think one of the main use cases that has been requested is
>>>>>>>> to be able
>>>>>>>> >> > to
>>>>>>>> >> > programmatically call the linker with "known good" object
>>>>>>>> files (i.e.
>>>>>>>> >> > produced by the compiler). That simplifies things a lot. Rui's
>>>>>>>> recent
>>>>>>>> >> > patches that are thread_local'izing existing globals seems
>>>>>>>> like a
>>>>>>>> >> > satisfactory approach. Or am I missing something?
>>>>>>>> >>
>>>>>>>> >> Yes, known good files are a lot easier to handle. We just have
>>>>>>>> to be
>>>>>>>> >> clear what "known good" is.
>>>>>>>> >>
>>>>>>>> >> > The R_X86_64_REX_GOTPCRELX situation can probably be likened
>>>>>>>> to someone
>>>>>>>> >> > giving clang a piece of source code with an inline asm that
>>>>>>>> has:
>>>>>>>> >> >
>>>>>>>> >> > .text
>>>>>>>> >> > .byte <some garbage>
>>>>>>>> >> >
>>>>>>>> >> > in it. We don't guarantee that the output "makes sense"
>>>>>>>> because there's
>>>>>>>> >> > really no way for us to know what "makes sense" in a precise
>>>>>>>> way (i.e.,
>>>>>>>> >> > a
>>>>>>>> >> > way that we can program).
>>>>>>>> >>
>>>>>>>> >> Would we still be required to check the offsets so we don't
>>>>>>>> crash? An
>>>>>>>> >> assembly file can contain
>>>>>>>> >>
>>>>>>>> >> .reloc 0, R_X86_64_REX_GOTPCRELX, foo
>>>>>>>> >> .long 4
>>>>>>>> >>
>>>>>>>> >> which would put that relocation in an invalid location. In
>>>>>>>> general, is
>>>>>>>> >> an arbitrary assembly file to be considered "known good"? Is
>>>>>>>> that true
>>>>>>>> >> even for things like
>>>>>>>> >>
>>>>>>>> >> .section .eh_frame, ....
>>>>>>>> >> garbage
>>>>>>>> >>
>>>>>>>> >> that the linker has to parse?
>>>>>>>> >
>>>>>>>> >
>>>>>>>> > I think the answer is case-by-case, but I don't think we have to
>>>>>>>> guarantee
>>>>>>>> > to recover from errors caused by carefully-crafted malicious
>>>>>>>> object files.
>>>>>>>> > (Is there anyone who disagrees with that?)
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> It is definitely not a use case *I* have an interest in. I just want
>>>>>>>> to be an agreement on what use case we want to support at the
>>>>>>>> moment.
>>>>>>>> Is it "any .o file", "any llvm-mc or gas produced .o", "any clang or
>>>>>>>> gcc produced .o not including inline asm"?
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Cheers,
>>>>>>>> Rafael
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> llvm-commits mailing list
>>>>>> llvm-commits at lists.llvm.org
>>>>>> http://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-commits
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>
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