| The Kernel Address Sanitizer (KASAN) |
| ==================================== |
| |
| Overview |
| -------- |
| |
| KernelAddressSANitizer (KASAN) is a dynamic memory error detector designed to |
| find out-of-bound and use-after-free bugs. KASAN has two modes: generic KASAN |
| (similar to userspace ASan) and software tag-based KASAN (similar to userspace |
| HWASan). |
| |
| KASAN uses compile-time instrumentation to insert validity checks before every |
| memory access, and therefore requires a compiler version that supports that. |
| |
| Generic KASAN is supported in both GCC and Clang. With GCC it requires version |
| 4.9.2 or later for basic support and version 5.0 or later for detection of |
| out-of-bounds accesses for stack and global variables and for inline |
| instrumentation mode (see the Usage section). With Clang it requires version |
| 7.0.0 or later and it doesn't support detection of out-of-bounds accesses for |
| global variables yet. |
| |
| Tag-based KASAN is only supported in Clang and requires version 7.0.0 or later. |
| |
| Currently generic KASAN is supported for the x86_64, arm64, xtensa and s390 |
| architectures, and tag-based KASAN is supported only for arm64. |
| |
| Usage |
| ----- |
| |
| To enable KASAN configure kernel with:: |
| |
| CONFIG_KASAN = y |
| |
| and choose between CONFIG_KASAN_GENERIC (to enable generic KASAN) and |
| CONFIG_KASAN_SW_TAGS (to enable software tag-based KASAN). |
| |
| You also need to choose between CONFIG_KASAN_OUTLINE and CONFIG_KASAN_INLINE. |
| Outline and inline are compiler instrumentation types. The former produces |
| smaller binary while the latter is 1.1 - 2 times faster. |
| |
| Both KASAN modes work with both SLUB and SLAB memory allocators. |
| For better bug detection and nicer reporting, enable CONFIG_STACKTRACE. |
| |
| To augment reports with last allocation and freeing stack of the physical page, |
| it is recommended to enable also CONFIG_PAGE_OWNER and boot with page_owner=on. |
| |
| To disable instrumentation for specific files or directories, add a line |
| similar to the following to the respective kernel Makefile: |
| |
| - For a single file (e.g. main.o):: |
| |
| KASAN_SANITIZE_main.o := n |
| |
| - For all files in one directory:: |
| |
| KASAN_SANITIZE := n |
| |
| Error reports |
| ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ |
| |
| A typical out-of-bounds access generic KASAN report looks like this:: |
| |
| ================================================================== |
| BUG: KASAN: slab-out-of-bounds in kmalloc_oob_right+0xa8/0xbc [test_kasan] |
| Write of size 1 at addr ffff8801f44ec37b by task insmod/2760 |
| |
| CPU: 1 PID: 2760 Comm: insmod Not tainted 4.19.0-rc3+ #698 |
| Hardware name: QEMU Standard PC (i440FX + PIIX, 1996), BIOS 1.10.2-1 04/01/2014 |
| Call Trace: |
| dump_stack+0x94/0xd8 |
| print_address_description+0x73/0x280 |
| kasan_report+0x144/0x187 |
| __asan_report_store1_noabort+0x17/0x20 |
| kmalloc_oob_right+0xa8/0xbc [test_kasan] |
| kmalloc_tests_init+0x16/0x700 [test_kasan] |
| do_one_initcall+0xa5/0x3ae |
| do_init_module+0x1b6/0x547 |
| load_module+0x75df/0x8070 |
| __do_sys_init_module+0x1c6/0x200 |
| __x64_sys_init_module+0x6e/0xb0 |
| do_syscall_64+0x9f/0x2c0 |
| entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x44/0xa9 |
| RIP: 0033:0x7f96443109da |
| RSP: 002b:00007ffcf0b51b08 EFLAGS: 00000202 ORIG_RAX: 00000000000000af |
| RAX: ffffffffffffffda RBX: 000055dc3ee521a0 RCX: 00007f96443109da |
| RDX: 00007f96445cff88 RSI: 0000000000057a50 RDI: 00007f9644992000 |
| RBP: 000055dc3ee510b0 R08: 0000000000000003 R09: 0000000000000000 |
| R10: 00007f964430cd0a R11: 0000000000000202 R12: 00007f96445cff88 |
| R13: 000055dc3ee51090 R14: 0000000000000000 R15: 0000000000000000 |
| |
| Allocated by task 2760: |
| save_stack+0x43/0xd0 |
| kasan_kmalloc+0xa7/0xd0 |
| kmem_cache_alloc_trace+0xe1/0x1b0 |
| kmalloc_oob_right+0x56/0xbc [test_kasan] |
| kmalloc_tests_init+0x16/0x700 [test_kasan] |
| do_one_initcall+0xa5/0x3ae |
| do_init_module+0x1b6/0x547 |
| load_module+0x75df/0x8070 |
| __do_sys_init_module+0x1c6/0x200 |
| __x64_sys_init_module+0x6e/0xb0 |
| do_syscall_64+0x9f/0x2c0 |
| entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x44/0xa9 |
| |
| Freed by task 815: |
| save_stack+0x43/0xd0 |
| __kasan_slab_free+0x135/0x190 |
| kasan_slab_free+0xe/0x10 |
| kfree+0x93/0x1a0 |
| umh_complete+0x6a/0xa0 |
| call_usermodehelper_exec_async+0x4c3/0x640 |
| ret_from_fork+0x35/0x40 |
| |
| The buggy address belongs to the object at ffff8801f44ec300 |
| which belongs to the cache kmalloc-128 of size 128 |
| The buggy address is located 123 bytes inside of |
| 128-byte region [ffff8801f44ec300, ffff8801f44ec380) |
| The buggy address belongs to the page: |
| page:ffffea0007d13b00 count:1 mapcount:0 mapping:ffff8801f7001640 index:0x0 |
| flags: 0x200000000000100(slab) |
| raw: 0200000000000100 ffffea0007d11dc0 0000001a0000001a ffff8801f7001640 |
| raw: 0000000000000000 0000000080150015 00000001ffffffff 0000000000000000 |
| page dumped because: kasan: bad access detected |
| |
| Memory state around the buggy address: |
| ffff8801f44ec200: fc fc fc fc fc fc fc fc fb fb fb fb fb fb fb fb |
| ffff8801f44ec280: fb fb fb fb fb fb fb fb fc fc fc fc fc fc fc fc |
| >ffff8801f44ec300: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 03 |
| ^ |
| ffff8801f44ec380: fc fc fc fc fc fc fc fc fb fb fb fb fb fb fb fb |
| ffff8801f44ec400: fb fb fb fb fb fb fb fb fc fc fc fc fc fc fc fc |
| ================================================================== |
| |
| The header of the report provides a short summary of what kind of bug happened |
| and what kind of access caused it. It's followed by a stack trace of the bad |
| access, a stack trace of where the accessed memory was allocated (in case bad |
| access happens on a slab object), and a stack trace of where the object was |
| freed (in case of a use-after-free bug report). Next comes a description of |
| the accessed slab object and information about the accessed memory page. |
| |
| In the last section the report shows memory state around the accessed address. |
| Reading this part requires some understanding of how KASAN works. |
| |
| The state of each 8 aligned bytes of memory is encoded in one shadow byte. |
| Those 8 bytes can be accessible, partially accessible, freed or be a redzone. |
| We use the following encoding for each shadow byte: 0 means that all 8 bytes |
| of the corresponding memory region are accessible; number N (1 <= N <= 7) means |
| that the first N bytes are accessible, and other (8 - N) bytes are not; |
| any negative value indicates that the entire 8-byte word is inaccessible. |
| We use different negative values to distinguish between different kinds of |
| inaccessible memory like redzones or freed memory (see mm/kasan/kasan.h). |
| |
| In the report above the arrows point to the shadow byte 03, which means that |
| the accessed address is partially accessible. |
| |
| For tag-based KASAN this last report section shows the memory tags around the |
| accessed address (see Implementation details section). |
| |
| |
| Implementation details |
| ---------------------- |
| |
| Generic KASAN |
| ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ |
| |
| From a high level, our approach to memory error detection is similar to that |
| of kmemcheck: use shadow memory to record whether each byte of memory is safe |
| to access, and use compile-time instrumentation to insert checks of shadow |
| memory on each memory access. |
| |
| Generic KASAN dedicates 1/8th of kernel memory to its shadow memory (e.g. 16TB |
| to cover 128TB on x86_64) and uses direct mapping with a scale and offset to |
| translate a memory address to its corresponding shadow address. |
| |
| Here is the function which translates an address to its corresponding shadow |
| address:: |
| |
| static inline void *kasan_mem_to_shadow(const void *addr) |
| { |
| return ((unsigned long)addr >> KASAN_SHADOW_SCALE_SHIFT) |
| + KASAN_SHADOW_OFFSET; |
| } |
| |
| where ``KASAN_SHADOW_SCALE_SHIFT = 3``. |
| |
| Compile-time instrumentation is used to insert memory access checks. Compiler |
| inserts function calls (__asan_load*(addr), __asan_store*(addr)) before each |
| memory access of size 1, 2, 4, 8 or 16. These functions check whether memory |
| access is valid or not by checking corresponding shadow memory. |
| |
| GCC 5.0 has possibility to perform inline instrumentation. Instead of making |
| function calls GCC directly inserts the code to check the shadow memory. |
| This option significantly enlarges kernel but it gives x1.1-x2 performance |
| boost over outline instrumented kernel. |
| |
| Software tag-based KASAN |
| ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ |
| |
| Tag-based KASAN uses the Top Byte Ignore (TBI) feature of modern arm64 CPUs to |
| store a pointer tag in the top byte of kernel pointers. Like generic KASAN it |
| uses shadow memory to store memory tags associated with each 16-byte memory |
| cell (therefore it dedicates 1/16th of the kernel memory for shadow memory). |
| |
| On each memory allocation tag-based KASAN generates a random tag, tags the |
| allocated memory with this tag, and embeds this tag into the returned pointer. |
| Software tag-based KASAN uses compile-time instrumentation to insert checks |
| before each memory access. These checks make sure that tag of the memory that |
| is being accessed is equal to tag of the pointer that is used to access this |
| memory. In case of a tag mismatch tag-based KASAN prints a bug report. |
| |
| Software tag-based KASAN also has two instrumentation modes (outline, that |
| emits callbacks to check memory accesses; and inline, that performs the shadow |
| memory checks inline). With outline instrumentation mode, a bug report is |
| simply printed from the function that performs the access check. With inline |
| instrumentation a brk instruction is emitted by the compiler, and a dedicated |
| brk handler is used to print bug reports. |
| |
| A potential expansion of this mode is a hardware tag-based mode, which would |
| use hardware memory tagging support instead of compiler instrumentation and |
| manual shadow memory manipulation. |