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Unrated severityNVD Advisory· Published Mar 27, 2025· Updated May 4, 2025

bpf: Fix pointer-leak due to insufficient speculative store bypass mitigation

CVE-2023-53024

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

bpf: Fix pointer-leak due to insufficient speculative store bypass mitigation

To mitigate Spectre v4, 2039f26f3aca ("bpf: Fix leakage due to insufficient speculative store bypass mitigation") inserts lfence instructions after 1) initializing a stack slot and 2) spilling a pointer to the stack.

However, this does not cover cases where a stack slot is first initialized with a pointer (subject to sanitization) but then overwritten with a scalar (not subject to sanitization because the slot was already initialized). In this case, the second write may be subject to speculative store bypass (SSB) creating a speculative pointer-as-scalar type confusion. This allows the program to subsequently leak the numerical pointer value using, for example, a branch-based cache side channel.

To fix this, also sanitize scalars if they write a stack slot that previously contained a pointer. Assuming that pointer-spills are only generated by LLVM on register-pressure, the performance impact on most real-world BPF programs should be small.

The following unprivileged BPF bytecode drafts a minimal exploit and the mitigation:

[...] // r6 = 0 or 1 (skalar, unknown user input) // r7 = accessible ptr for side channel // r10 = frame pointer (fp), to be leaked // r9 = r10 # fp alias to encourage ssb *(u64 *)(r9 - 8) = r10 // fp[-8] = ptr, to be leaked // lfence added here because of pointer spill to stack. // // Ommitted: Dummy bpf_ringbuf_output() here to train alias predictor // for no r9-r10 dependency. // *(u64 *)(r10 - 8) = r6 // fp[-8] = scalar, overwrites ptr // 2039f26f3aca: no lfence added because stack slot was not STACK_INVALID, // store may be subject to SSB // // fix: also add an lfence when the slot contained a ptr // r8 = *(u64 *)(r9 - 8) // r8 = architecturally a scalar, speculatively a ptr // // leak ptr using branch-based cache side channel: r8 &= 1 // choose bit to leak if r8 == 0 goto SLOW // no mispredict // architecturally dead code if input r6 is 0, // only executes speculatively iff ptr bit is 1 r8 = *(u64 *)(r7 + 0) # encode bit in cache (0: slow, 1: fast) SLOW: [...]

After running this, the program can time the access to *(r7 + 0) to determine whether the chosen pointer bit was 0 or 1. Repeat this 64 times to recover the whole address on amd64.

In summary, sanitization can only be skipped if one scalar is overwritten with another scalar. Scalar-confusion due to speculative store bypass can not lead to invalid accesses because the pointer bounds deducted during verification are enforced using branchless logic. See 979d63d50c0c ("bpf: prevent out of bounds speculation on pointer arithmetic") for details.

Do not make the mitigation depend on !env->allow_{uninit_stack,ptr_leaks} because speculative leaks are likely unexpected if these were enabled. For example, leaking the address to a protected log file may be acceptable while disabling the mitigation might unintentionally leak the address into the cached-state of a map that is accessible to unprivileged processes.

Affected products

136

Patches

0

No patches discovered yet.

Vulnerability mechanics

AI mechanics synthesis has not run for this CVE yet.

References

6

News mentions

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