tracing: Add a verifier to check string pointers for trace events

It is a common mistake for someone writing a trace event to save a pointer
to a string in the TP_fast_assign() and then display that string pointer
in the TP_printk() with %s. The problem is that those two events may happen
a long time apart, where the source of the string may no longer exist.

The proper way to handle displaying any string that is not guaranteed to be
in the kernel core rodata section, is to copy it into the ring buffer via
the __string(), __assign_str() and __get_str() helper macros.

Add a check at run time while displaying the TP_printk() of events to make
sure that every %s referenced is safe to dereference, and if it is not,
trigger a warning and only show the address of the pointer, and the
dereferenced string if it can be safely retrieved with a
strncpy_from_kernel_nofault() call.

In order to not have to copy the parsing of vsnprintf() formats, or even
exporting its code, the verifier relies on vsnprintf() being able to
modify the va_list that is passed to it, and it remains modified after it
is called. This is the case for some architectures like x86_64, but other
architectures like x86_32 pass the va_list to vsnprintf() as a value not a
reference, and the verifier can not use it to parse the non string
arguments. Thus, at boot up, it is checked if vsnprintf() modifies the
passed in va_list or not, and a static branch will disable the verifier if
it's not compatible.

Signed-off-by: Steven Rostedt (VMware) <rostedt@goodmis.org>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions