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While trying to get an upcoming piece of code through testsc, I had
trouble - _yet again_ - with the way that control flow diverges inside
the glibc implementations of functions like memcpy and memset,
depending on the alignment of the input blocks _above_ the alignment
guaranteed by malloc, so that doing the same sequence of malloc +
memset can lead to different control flow. (I believe this is done
either for cache performance reasons or SIMD alignment requirements,
or both: on x86, some SIMD instructions require memory alignment
beyond what malloc guarantees, which is also awkward for our x86
hardware crypto implementations.)
My previous effort to normalise this problem out of sclog's log files
worked by wrapping memset and all its synonyms that I could find. But
this weekend, that failed for me, and the reason appears to be ifuncs.
I'm aware of the great irony of committing code to a security project
with a log message saying something vague about ifuncs, on the same
weekend that it came to light that commits matching that description
were one of the methods used to smuggle a backdoor into the XZ Utils
project (CVE-2024-3094). So I'll bend over backwards to explain both
what I think is going on, and why this _isn't_ a weird ifunc-related
backdooring attempt:
When I say I 'wrap' memset, I mean I use DynamoRIO's 'drwrap' API to
arrange that the side-channel test rig calls a function of mine before
and after each call to memset. The way drwrap works is to look up the
symbol address in either the main program or a shared library; in this
case, it's a shared library, namely libc.so. Then it intercepts call
instructions with exactly that address as the target.
Unfortunately, what _actually_ happens when the main program calls
memset is more complicated. First, control goes to the PLT entry for
memset (still in the main program). In principle, that loads a GOT
entry containing the address of memset (filled in by ld.so), and jumps
to it. But in fact the GOT entry varies its value through the program;
on the first call, it points to a resolver function, whose job is to
_find out_ the address of memset. And in the version of libc.so I'm
currently running, that resolver is an STT_GNU_IFUNC indirection
function, which tests the host CPU's capabilities, and chooses an
actual implementation of memset depending on what it finds. (In my
case, it looks as if it's picking one that makes extensive use of x86
SIMD.) To avoid the overhead of doing this on every call, the returned
function pointer is then written into the main program's GOT entry for
memset, overwriting the address of the resolver function, so that the
_next_ call the main program makes through the same PLT entry will go
directly to the memset variant that was chosen.
And the problem is that, after this has happened, none of the new
control flow ever goes near the _official_ address of memset, as read
out of libc.so's dynamic symbol table by DynamoRIO. The PLT entry
isn't at that address, and neither is the particular SIMD variant that
the resolver ended up choosing. So now my wrapper on memset is never
being invoked, and memset cheerfully generates different control flow
in runs of my crypto code that testsc expects to be doing exactly the
same thing as each other, and all my tests fail spuriously.
My solution, at least for the moment, is to completely abandon the
strategy of wrapping memset. Instead, let's just make it behave the
same way every time, by forcing all the affected memory allocations to
have extra-strict alignment. I found that 64-byte alignment is not
good enough to eliminate memset-related test failures, but 128-byte
alignment is.
This would be tricky in itself, if it weren't for the fact that PuTTY
already has its own wrapper function on malloc (for various reasons),
which everything in our code already uses. So I can divert to C11's
aligned_alloc() there. That in turn is done by adding a new #ifdef to
utils/memory.c, and compiling it with that #ifdef into a new object
library that is included in testsc, superseding the standard memory.o
that would otherwise be pulled in from our 'utils' static library.
With the previous memset-compensator removed, this means testsc is now
dependent on having aligned_alloc() available. So we test for it at
cmake time, and don't build testsc at all if it can't be found. This
shouldn't bother anyone very much; aligned_alloc() is available on
_my_ testsc platform, and if anyone else is trying to run this test
suite at all, I expect it will be on something at least as new as
that.
(One awkward thing here is that we can only replace _new_ allocations
with calls to aligned_alloc(): C11 provides no aligned version of
realloc. Happily, this doesn't currently introduce any new problems in
testsc. If it does, I might have to do something even more painful in
future.)
So, why isn't this an ifunc-related backdoor attempt? Because (and you
can check all of this from the patch):
1. The memset-wrapping code exists entirely within the DynamoRIO
plugin module that lives in test/sclog. That is not used in
production, only for running the 'testsc' side-channel tester.
2. The memset-wrapping code is _removed_ by this patch, not added.
3. None of this code is dealing directly with ifuncs - only working
around the unwanted effects on my test suite from the fact that
they exist somewhere else and introduce awkward behaviour.
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