From 050e9baa9dc9fbd9ce2b27f0056990fc9e0a08a0 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Linus Torvalds Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2018 12:21:18 +0900 Subject: Kbuild: rename CC_STACKPROTECTOR[_STRONG] config variables The changes to automatically test for working stack protector compiler support in the Kconfig files removed the special STACKPROTECTOR_AUTO option that picked the strongest stack protector that the compiler supported. That was all a nice cleanup - it makes no sense to have the AUTO case now that the Kconfig phase can just determine the compiler support directly. HOWEVER. It also meant that doing "make oldconfig" would now _disable_ the strong stackprotector if you had AUTO enabled, because in a legacy config file, the sane stack protector configuration would look like CONFIG_HAVE_CC_STACKPROTECTOR=y # CONFIG_CC_STACKPROTECTOR_NONE is not set # CONFIG_CC_STACKPROTECTOR_REGULAR is not set # CONFIG_CC_STACKPROTECTOR_STRONG is not set CONFIG_CC_STACKPROTECTOR_AUTO=y and when you ran this through "make oldconfig" with the Kbuild changes, it would ask you about the regular CONFIG_CC_STACKPROTECTOR (that had been renamed from CONFIG_CC_STACKPROTECTOR_REGULAR to just CONFIG_CC_STACKPROTECTOR), but it would think that the STRONG version used to be disabled (because it was really enabled by AUTO), and would disable it in the new config, resulting in: CONFIG_HAVE_CC_STACKPROTECTOR=y CONFIG_CC_HAS_STACKPROTECTOR_NONE=y CONFIG_CC_STACKPROTECTOR=y # CONFIG_CC_STACKPROTECTOR_STRONG is not set CONFIG_CC_HAS_SANE_STACKPROTECTOR=y That's dangerously subtle - people could suddenly find themselves with the weaker stack protector setup without even realizing. The solution here is to just rename not just the old RECULAR stack protector option, but also the strong one. This does that by just removing the CC_ prefix entirely for the user choices, because it really is not about the compiler support (the compiler support now instead automatially impacts _visibility_ of the options to users). This results in "make oldconfig" actually asking the user for their choice, so that we don't have any silent subtle security model changes. The end result would generally look like this: CONFIG_HAVE_CC_STACKPROTECTOR=y CONFIG_CC_HAS_STACKPROTECTOR_NONE=y CONFIG_STACKPROTECTOR=y CONFIG_STACKPROTECTOR_STRONG=y CONFIG_CC_HAS_SANE_STACKPROTECTOR=y where the "CC_" versions really are about internal compiler infrastructure, not the user selections. Acked-by: Masahiro Yamada Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds --- Documentation/security/self-protection.rst | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) (limited to 'Documentation/security') diff --git a/Documentation/security/self-protection.rst b/Documentation/security/self-protection.rst index 0f53826c78b9..e1ca698e0006 100644 --- a/Documentation/security/self-protection.rst +++ b/Documentation/security/self-protection.rst @@ -156,7 +156,7 @@ The classic stack buffer overflow involves writing past the expected end of a variable stored on the stack, ultimately writing a controlled value to the stack frame's stored return address. The most widely used defense is the presence of a stack canary between the stack variables and the -return address (``CONFIG_CC_STACKPROTECTOR``), which is verified just before +return address (``CONFIG_STACKPROTECTOR``), which is verified just before the function returns. Other defenses include things like shadow stacks. Stack depth overflow -- cgit v1.2.3