This code is there not for performance

Posted Feb 12, 2008 12:44 UTC (Tue) by mjthayer (guest, #39183)
In reply to: This code is there not for performance by khim
Parent article: vmsplice(): the making of a local root exploit

Perhaps I misunderstood here, but I think that the original poster was saying something else -
not that you do not do all these things (strange arithmetic and suchlike), but that you keep
the code in one place (i.e. a set of macros) instead of duplicating it in lots of places.

Not that it would have helped much here, since the problem was a failure to validate user
input.

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This code is there not for performance

Posted Feb 12, 2008 13:50 UTC (Tue) by ms (subscriber, #41272) [Link] (14 responses)

I'm obviously going to sound like a broken record again. The problem is validating incoming
data. Now you next need to ask, "why should we validate user input?" to which the answer is
"because the user can supply silly values" to which the next question is "well why can the
user to supply silly values?" to which the answer is "because the type of the values the user
is supplying are too wide". So basically, you're using the wrong types. Users should not be
allowed to present "bad" input: the type system should prevent it. In an ideal world...

This code is there not for performance

Posted Feb 12, 2008 14:38 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (7 responses)

That's nice in theory, but I'm not sure it's entirely practical to require the users to
provide a different pointer type for every possible VM range!

(Also, kernel/user boundaries are necessarily special places: typing across the boundary is a
matter of consensus as much as enforcement.)

This code is there not for performance

Posted Feb 12, 2008 14:49 UTC (Tue) by ms (subscriber, #41272) [Link] (6 responses)

Yeah, I don't disagree. It is a hard thing to do - you tend to get into messes with
dependently typed languages and so forth - one could easily argue that they're not quite ready
for writing kernels in!

Typically, you first implement maths in the type system, then you can implement a basic "is
smaller than" so then you could effectively arbitrarily refine the int range to be "the value
must be an int and must also be smaller than x". That kinda thing. Of course, as soon as you
hit "the value must be a function which will terminate", you're in trouble...!

This code is there not for performance

Posted Feb 12, 2008 15:05 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (5 responses)

There are a good few languages (Cayenne and Qi spring to mind) with type systems that are so
powerful that they themselves trip the halting problem: compilation is no longer guaranteed to
terminate. :)

I suppose a simple ranged length type (length must be >0) would have sufficed here: you
wouldn't need separate types for every possible valid pointer range.

Halting problem ? Ha!

Posted Feb 12, 2008 20:17 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (4 responses)

C++ has them beat: it's type system is not just trigger halting problem, it's turing-complete!

Halting problem ? Ha!

Posted Feb 12, 2008 21:00 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

C++'s template expander is modelled on ML's pattern matching. Cayenne and 
Qi are both perhaps two generations beyond that (both type systems being 
more powerful than Haskell's) in different directions: personally I prefer 
Qi's, but part of that is probably because it's possible to bootstrap the 
Qi implementation without being an ultra-guru).

Of course, C++ compilers often *appear* to not halt when compiling 
anyway ;}

Halting problem ? Ha!

Posted Feb 14, 2008 22:01 UTC (Thu) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link] (2 responses)

I don't know if you're joking about C++, but one of the notable things about Qi is that its
type system *is* Turing-complete, by intent and proof (someone implemented SK combinators in
it).

Halting problem ? Ha!

Posted Feb 15, 2008 0:06 UTC (Fri) by ms (subscriber, #41272) [Link] (1 responses)

No, nix wasn't joking. If you use C++ templates and limit yourself to numbers then it really
is turing complete. Haskell, with the right flags (undecidable instances and overlapping
instances) is also Turing complete. Cayenne is deliberately so and many people are now really
thinking that it's just better to permit Turing completeness and let the programmer take
responsibility.

The alternative is more like what Epigram is looking at (amongst others) where you limit
recursion to on the structure of terms and prevent infinite structures. That way, you can
still guarantee termination. I fear we may now be some way from the original issue though ;)

Halting problem ? Ha!

Posted Feb 15, 2008 21:48 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I used the wrong terms, really. What Haskell, Cayenne and Qi provide over 
C++ is (radically) greater *expressiveness*. The syntax of Qi type 
definitions is especially strange, but it's a hell of a lot saner than 
trying to define anything complicated using C++ templates.

This code is there not for performance

Posted Feb 13, 2008 15:45 UTC (Wed) by werth1 (guest, #48435) [Link]

The answer to the second question "why can the user supply silly values?" is more like:
Because he can.
The user is free to chose any language he wants to interface with the kernel.
In particular the user is free to chose a language without or limited type checks.
So any range checks on system functions have to be in the kernel itself.

This code is there not for performance

Posted Feb 16, 2008 11:28 UTC (Sat) by ernest (guest, #2355) [Link] (4 responses)

It is unfortunate that the CPU cannot enforce signedness and size types. 
Anybody programming in assembly can bypass any higher level language type 
checks you have in mind. This is true even if the users has the best 
intentions.

Ernest.

This code is there not for performance

Posted Feb 17, 2008 19:50 UTC (Sun) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (3 responses)

It is unfortunate that the CPU cannot enforce signedness and size types.

The unfortunateness is at a lower level than that. It's unfortunate that a CPU can't do ordinary integer math, where 2 + 2 = 4. I understand why the very first CPUs wrapped around integers -- it happens naturally with the simplest implementations. But I don't get why no CPU today provides even the option of trapping on an arithmetic overflow instead of wrapping around silently. They do it for floating point, but not for integers.

Trapping on overflow

Posted Feb 23, 2008 21:45 UTC (Sat) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link] (2 responses)

But I don't get why no CPU today provides even the option of trapping on an arithmetic overflow.

MIPS and Alpha have separate arithmetic instructions that trap on signed overflow (e.g., ADD on MIPS and ADDV on Alpha). IA-32 has INTO which traps if OF is set. Apparently this instruction was so rarely used by programmers, that AMD64 removed it in order to free up some opcode space, and did not even bother to allocate another (multi-byte) opcode for it; but you can still implement the functionality by combining JO (or JNO) with INT.

The existence of INTO has not helped against this security hole, though.

Trapping on overflow

Posted Feb 23, 2008 22:24 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (1 responses)

MIPS and Alpha have separate arithmetic instructions that trap on signed overflow ...

Nice. Do you know if there is any way to make GCC (or any other C compiler) generate such instructions?

I can understand people resisting adding instructions to handle overflow, but if I could declare in my C program "no arithmetic in here is supposed to wrap around" and get signalled to death if it does, I'd do it a lot.

Trapping on overflow

Posted Feb 28, 2008 21:23 UTC (Thu) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link]

Apart from asm statements and modifying gcc I don't know of a way to get gcc or other compilers to use the trapping instructions for C code.

Concerning "no arithmetic in here is supposed to wrap around", unsigned arithmetic is supposed to wrap around in standard C, only signed arithmetic is allowed to trap (or do anything else) on overflow.