[v3,0/4] Allow default HARDENED_USERCOPY to be set at compile time

Message

Mel Gorman Jan. 23, 2025, 10:11 p.m. UTC

Changelog since v2
o Default on
o Logic correction and simplification

Changelog since v1
o Menu section rename
o Make static branch usage similar to init_on_alloc
o Change ordering of menu options

Some hardening options like HARDENED_USERCOPY can be set at boot time
and have negligible cost when disabled. The default for options like
init_on_alloc= can be set at compile time but hardened usercopy is
enabled by default if built in. This incurs overhead when a kernel
wishes to provide optional hardening but the user does not necessarily
care.

Hardening is desirable in some environments but ideally they would be opt-in
by kernel command line as hardening is typically a deliberate decision
whereas the performance overhead is not always obvious to all users.
Patches 1 and 2 move HARDENED_USERCOPY to the Kconfig.hardening and
default it to disabled. Patch 3 moves the static branch check to a fast
path similar to init_on_*. Patch 4 moves FORTIFY_SOURCE to hardening only
because the option is related to hardening and happened to be declared
near HARDENED_USERCOPY.

Building HARDENED_USERCOPY but disabled at runtime has neligible effect
within the noise. Enabling the option by default generally incurs 2-10%
of overhead depending on the workload with some extreme outliers depending
on the exact CPU. While the benchmarks are somewhat synthetic, the overhead
IO-intensive and network-intensive is easily detectable but the root cause
may not be obvious (e.g. 2-14% overhead for netperf TCP_STREAM running
over localhost with different ranges depending on the CPU).

 .../admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt         |  4 ++-
 include/linux/thread_info.h                   |  8 ++++-
 mm/usercopy.c                                 | 16 +++++----
 security/Kconfig                              | 21 ------------
 security/Kconfig.hardening                    | 33 +++++++++++++++++++
 5 files changed, 52 insertions(+), 30 deletions(-)

Comments

Kees Cook Jan. 23, 2025, 11:51 p.m. UTC | #1

On Thu, Jan 23, 2025 at 10:11:11PM +0000, Mel Gorman wrote:
> Changelog since v2
> o Default on
> o Logic correction and simplification

Thanks, this look good to me! I'll get this added to the hardening tree
once the merge window closes.