On Tue, 17 Mar 2015 13:01:42 -0500, John McKown <[email protected]> 
wrote:

>Now that I think on it, one could "mess up" the "rogue" programs
>attempts to modify an RSA by deliberately messing up the savearea
>chain pointers in the save area pointed to by TCBFSA to defeat forward
>save area chaining (perhaps copying the values in that area somewhere
>else and setting all 72 bytes to x'00'), setting R13 to some page
>boundary GETMAIN'd storage (get 8K and page protect the second 4K
>using PGSER), doing the SYNCHX setup previously mentioned, and
>restoring the save area chain pointers and restoring the FSA values
>after the SYNCHX returns. Of course, this does not stop a "rogue" from
>modifying key 8 storage. It just makes it more difficult to find
>something "interesting" to modify. In fact, if there are critical
>areas which are key 8, GETMAIN them on page boundaries in page
>multiples and use PGSER to mark them read-only before the SYNCHX and
>then read-write afterwards. Again, this is not impossible to get
>around. But it adds another level of coding to the rogue program.

But TCBFSA points to one of the more interesting areas for the rogue program to 
modify :)

Yes, you can build in a little more protection by having the main program 
simply issue SVC 3 rather than restoring registers and branching to R14. But 
there are probably lots of other key 8 areas you'd still need to worry about. 
So it's really not a bullet-proof solution.

-- 
Walt

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