This improves the expressiveness of unprivileged BPF by inserting
speculation barriers instead of rejecting the programs.
The approach was previously presented at LPC'24 [1] and RAID'24 [2].
To mitigate the Spectre v1 (PHT) vulnerability, the kernel rejects
potentially-dangerous unprivileged BPF programs as of
commit 9183671af6db ("bpf: Fix leakage under speculation on mispredicted
branches"). In [2], we have analyzed 364 object files from open source
projects (Linux Samples and Selftests, BCC, Loxilb, Cilium, libbpf
Examples, Parca, and Prevail) and found that this affects 31% to 54% of
programs.
To resolve this in the majority of cases this patchset adds a fall-back
for mitigating Spectre v1 using speculation barriers. The kernel still
optimistically attempts to verify all speculative paths but uses
speculation barriers against v1 when unsafe behavior is detected. This
allows for more programs to be accepted without disabling the BPF
Spectre mitigations (e.g., by setting cpu_mitigations_off()).
For this, it relies on the fact that speculation barriers prevent all
later instructions if the speculation was not correct:
* On x86_64, lfence acts as full speculation barrier, not only as a
load fence [3]:
An LFENCE instruction or a serializing instruction will ensure that
no later instructions execute, even speculatively, until all prior
instructions complete locally. [...] Inserting an LFENCE instruction
after a bounds check prevents later operations from executing before
the bound check completes.
This was experimentally confirmed in [4].
* ARM's SB speculation barrier instruction also affects "any instruction
that appears later in the program order than the barrier" [5].
In [1] we have measured the overhead of this approach relative to having
mitigations off and including the upstream Spectre v4 mitigations. For
event tracing and stack-sampling profilers, we found that mitigations
increase BPF program execution time by 0% to 62%. For the Loxilb network
load balancer, we have measured a 14% slowdown in SCTP performance but
no significant slowdown for TCP. This overhead only applies to programs
that were previously rejected.
I reran the expressiveness-evaluation with v6.14 and made sure the main
results still match those from [1] and [2] (which used v6.5).
Main design decisions are:
* Do not use separate bytecode insns for v1 and v4 barriers. This
simplifies the verifier significantly and has the only downside that
performance on PowerPC is not as high as it could be.
* Allow archs to still disable v1/v4 mitigations separately by setting
bpf_jit_bypass_spec_v1/v4(). This has the benefit that archs can
benefit from improved BPF expressiveness / performance if they are not
vulnerable (e.g., ARM64 for v4 in the kernel).
* Do not remove the empty BPF_NOSPEC implementation for backends for
which it is unknown whether they are vulnerable to Spectre v1.
[1] https://lpc.events/event/18/contributions/1954/ ("Mitigating
Spectre-PHT using Speculation Barriers in Linux eBPF")
[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.00078 ("VeriFence: Lightweight and
Precise Spectre Defenses for Untrusted Linux Kernel Extensions")
[3]
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/technical/software-security-guidance/technical-documentation/runtime-speculative-side-channel-mitigations.html
("Managed Runtime Speculative Execution Side Channel Mitigations")
[4] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3359789.3359837 ("Speculator: a
tool to analyze speculative execution attacks and mitigations" -
Section 4.6 "Stopping Speculative Execution")
[5]
https://developer.arm.com/documentation/ddi0597/2020-12/Base-Instructions/SB--Speculation-Barrier-
("SB - Speculation Barrier - Arm Armv8-A A32/T32 Instruction Set
Architecture (2020-12)")
Changes:
* v1 -> v2:
- Drop former commits 9 ("bpf: Return PTR_ERR from push_stack()") and 11
("bpf: Fall back to nospec for spec path verification") as suggested
by Alexei. This series therefore no longer changes push_stack() to
return PTR_ERR.
- Add detailed explanation of how lfence works internally and how it
affects the algorithm.
- Add tests checking that nospec instructions are inserted in expected
locations using __xlated_unpriv as suggested by Eduard (also,
include a fix for __xlated_unpriv)
- Add a test for the mitigations from the description of
commit 9183671af6db ("bpf: Fix leakage under speculation on
mispredicted branches")
- Remove unused variables from do_check[_insn]() as suggested by
Eduard.
- Remove INSN_IDX_MODIFIED to improve readability as suggested by
Eduard. This also causes the nospec_result-check to run (and fail)
for jumping-ops. Add a warning to assert that this check must never
succeed in that case.
- Add details on the safety of patch 10 ("bpf: Allow nospec-protected
var-offset stack access") based on the feedback on v1.
- Rebase to bpf-next-250420
- Link to v1:
https://lore.kernel.org/all/20250313172127.1098195-1-luis.gerho...@fau.de/
* RFC -> v1:
- rebase to bpf-next-250313
- tests: mark expected successes/new errors
- add bpt_jit_bypass_spec_v1/v4() to avoid #ifdef in
bpf_bypass_spec_v1/v4()
- ensure that nospec with v1-support is implemented for archs for
which GCC supports speculation barriers, except for MIPS
- arm64: emit speculation barrier
- powerpc: change nospec to include v1 barrier
- discuss potential security (archs that do not impl. BPF nospec) and
performance (only PowerPC) regressions
- Linkt to RFC:
https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/20250224203619.594724-1-luis.gerho...@fau.de/
Luis Gerhorst (11):
selftests/bpf: Fix caps for __xlated/jited_unpriv
bpf: Move insn if/else into do_check_insn()
bpf: Return -EFAULT on misconfigurations
bpf: Return -EFAULT on internal errors
bpf, arm64, powerpc: Add bpf_jit_bypass_spec_v1/v4()
bpf, arm64, powerpc: Change nospec to include v1 barrier
bpf: Rename sanitize_stack_spill to nospec_result
bpf: Fall back to nospec for Spectre v1
selftests/bpf: Add test for Spectre v1 mitigation
bpf: Allow nospec-protected var-offset stack access
bpf: Fall back to nospec for sanitization-failures
arch/arm64/net/bpf_jit.h | 5 +
arch/arm64/net/bpf_jit_comp.c | 28 +-
arch/powerpc/net/bpf_jit_comp64.c | 79 ++-
include/linux/bpf.h | 11 +-
include/linux/bpf_verifier.h | 3 +-
include/linux/filter.h | 2 +-
kernel/bpf/core.c | 32 +-
kernel/bpf/verifier.c | 648 ++++++++++--------
tools/testing/selftests/bpf/progs/bpf_misc.h | 4 +
.../selftests/bpf/progs/verifier_and.c | 8 +-
.../selftests/bpf/progs/verifier_bounds.c | 66 +-
.../bpf/progs/verifier_bounds_deduction.c | 45 +-
.../selftests/bpf/progs/verifier_map_ptr.c | 20 +-
.../selftests/bpf/progs/verifier_movsx.c | 16 +-
.../selftests/bpf/progs/verifier_unpriv.c | 65 +-
.../bpf/progs/verifier_value_ptr_arith.c | 101 ++-
tools/testing/selftests/bpf/test_loader.c | 14 +-
.../selftests/bpf/verifier/dead_code.c | 3 +-
tools/testing/selftests/bpf/verifier/jmp32.c | 33 +-
tools/testing/selftests/bpf/verifier/jset.c | 10 +-
20 files changed, 765 insertions(+), 428 deletions(-)
base-commit: 8582d9ab3efdebb88e0cd8beed8e0b9de76443e7
--
2.49.0
