bpf: Allow variable-offset stack access

Before this patch, variable offset access to the stack was dissalowed
for regular instructions, but was allowed for "indirect" accesses (i.e.
helpers). This patch removes the restriction, allowing reading and
writing to the stack through stack pointers with variable offsets. This
makes stack-allocated buffers more usable in programs, and brings stack
pointers closer to other types of pointers.

The motivation is being able to use stack-allocated buffers for data
manipulation. When the stack size limit is sufficient, allocating
buffers on the stack is simpler than per-cpu arrays, or other
alternatives.

In unpriviledged programs, variable-offset reads and writes are
disallowed (they were already disallowed for the indirect access case)
because the speculative execution checking code doesn't support them.
Additionally, when writing through a variable-offset stack pointer, if
any pointers are in the accessible range, there's possilibities of later
leaking pointers because the write cannot be tracked precisely.

Writes with variable offset mark the whole range as initialized, even
though we don't know which stack slots are actually written. This is in
order to not reject future reads to these slots. Note that this doesn't
affect writes done through helpers; like before, helpers need the whole
stack range to be initialized to begin with.
All the stack slots are in range are considered scalars after the write;
variable-offset register spills are not tracked.

For reads, all the stack slots in the variable range needs to be
initialized (but see above about what writes do), otherwise the read is
rejected. All register spilled in stack slots that might be read are
marked as having been read, however reads through such pointers don't do
register filling; the target register will always be either a scalar or
a constant zero.

Signed-off-by: Andrei Matei <andreimatei1@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Alexei Starovoitov <ast@kernel.org>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/20210207011027.676572-2-andreimatei1@gmail.com

1 files changed, 5 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/bpf.h b/include/linux/bpf.h
index 321966fc35db..079162bbd387 100644
--- a/include/linux/bpf.h
+++ b/include/linux/bpf.h
@@ -1290,6 +1290,11 @@ static inline bool bpf_allow_ptr_leaks(void)
 	return perfmon_capable();
 }
 
+static inline bool bpf_allow_uninit_stack(void)
+{
+	return perfmon_capable();
+}
+
 static inline bool bpf_allow_ptr_to_map_access(void)
 {
 	return perfmon_capable();