powerpc/rtas: Restrict RTAS requests from userspace

A number of userspace utilities depend on making calls to RTAS to retrieve
information and update various things.

The existing API through which we expose RTAS to userspace exposes more
RTAS functionality than we actually need, through the sys_rtas syscall,
which allows root (or anyone with CAP_SYS_ADMIN) to make any RTAS call they
want with arbitrary arguments.

Many RTAS calls take the address of a buffer as an argument, and it's up to
the caller to specify the physical address of the buffer as an argument. We
allocate a buffer (the "RMO buffer") in the Real Memory Area that RTAS can
access, and then expose the physical address and size of this buffer in
/proc/powerpc/rtas/rmo_buffer. Userspace is expected to read this address,
poke at the buffer using /dev/mem, and pass an address in the RMO buffer to
the RTAS call.

However, there's nothing stopping the caller from specifying whatever
address they want in the RTAS call, and it's easy to construct a series of
RTAS calls that can overwrite arbitrary bytes (even without /dev/mem
access).

Additionally, there are some RTAS calls that do potentially dangerous
things and for which there are no legitimate userspace use cases.

In the past, this would not have been a particularly big deal as it was
assumed that root could modify all system state freely, but with Secure
Boot and lockdown we need to care about this.

We can't fundamentally change the ABI at this point, however we can address
this by implementing a filter that checks RTAS calls against a list
of permitted calls and forces the caller to use addresses within the RMO
buffer.

The list is based off the list of calls that are used by the librtas
userspace library, and has been tested with a number of existing userspace
RTAS utilities. For compatibility with any applications we are not aware of
that require other calls, the filter can be turned off at build time.

Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
Reported-by: Daniel Axtens <dja@axtens.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Donnellan <ajd@linux.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael Ellerman <mpe@ellerman.id.au>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20200820044512.7543-1-ajd@linux.ibm.com

1 files changed, 13 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/arch/powerpc/Kconfig b/arch/powerpc/Kconfig
index fe0e6b317cc2..6c76caa950e1 100644
--- a/arch/powerpc/Kconfig
+++ b/arch/powerpc/Kconfig
@@ -1004,6 +1004,19 @@ config PPC_SECVAR_SYSFS
 	  read/write operations on these variables. Say Y if you have
 	  secure boot enabled and want to expose variables to userspace.
 
+config PPC_RTAS_FILTER
+	bool "Enable filtering of RTAS syscalls"
+	default y
+	depends on PPC_RTAS
+	help
+	  The RTAS syscall API has security issues that could be used to
+	  compromise system integrity. This option enforces restrictions on the
+	  RTAS calls and arguments passed by userspace programs to mitigate
+	  these issues.
+
+	  Say Y unless you know what you are doing and the filter is causing
+	  problems for you.
+
 endmenu
 
 config ISA_DMA_API