• Roland McGrath's avatar
    [PATCH] i386: clear segment register padding in core dumps · 6ea65ff7
    Roland McGrath authored
    The segment register slots in struct pt_regs are padded to 32 bits.
    Some of these are stored with instructions like "pushl %es", which
    leaves the high 16 bits as they were.  So the high bits of these
    fields in struct pt_regs contain kernel stack garbage.  These bits are
    ignored by everything and never leak to user space, except in core
    dumps.  The user struct pt_regs is always at the base of the thread's
    kernel stack and so it seems unlikely the information that leaks from
    here is ever worthwhile so as to be a security concern, but I'm not
    sure about that.  It has been this way for ages; userland consumers of
    core dumps all mask off these high bits themselves.  So it is not urgent.
    
    This change masks off the padding bits of the segment register slots
    in core dumps.  ptrace already masks off these high bits, so this
    makes the values in core dumps consistent with what ptrace would
    report just before the process died.
    
    As I read the processor manuals, the cs and ss values will always be
    padded with zero bits rather than stack garbage.  But unlike "pushl %es",
    this is not simple to test with a userland program.  So I added the two
    instructions rather than wonder if they are really never necessary.
    
    I think that x86_64 does not have this problem (for either 32-bit or
    64-bit processes).  It only uses "mov" instructions from segment
    registers, which zero-extend.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarRoland McGrath <roland@redhat.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    6ea65ff7
elf.h 5.14 KB