[PATCH 0/8] xen: harden frontends against malicious backends

Juergen Gross jgross at suse.com
Thu May 13 20:02:54 AEST 2021


Xen backends of para-virtualized devices can live in dom0 kernel, dom0
user land, or in a driver domain. This means that a backend might
reside in a less trusted environment than the Xen core components, so
a backend should not be able to do harm to a Xen guest (it can still
mess up I/O data, but it shouldn't be able to e.g. crash a guest by
other means or cause a privilege escalation in the guest).

Unfortunately many frontends in the Linux kernel are fully trusting
their respective backends. This series is starting to fix the most
important frontends: console, disk and network.

It was discussed to handle this as a security problem, but the topic
was discussed in public before, so it isn't a real secret.

Juergen Gross (8):
  xen: sync include/xen/interface/io/ring.h with Xen's newest version
  xen/blkfront: read response from backend only once
  xen/blkfront: don't take local copy of a request from the ring page
  xen/blkfront: don't trust the backend response data blindly
  xen/netfront: read response from backend only once
  xen/netfront: don't read data from request on the ring page
  xen/netfront: don't trust the backend response data blindly
  xen/hvc: replace BUG_ON() with negative return value

 drivers/block/xen-blkfront.c    | 118 +++++++++-----
 drivers/net/xen-netfront.c      | 184 ++++++++++++++-------
 drivers/tty/hvc/hvc_xen.c       |  15 +-
 include/xen/interface/io/ring.h | 278 ++++++++++++++++++--------------
 4 files changed, 369 insertions(+), 226 deletions(-)

-- 
2.26.2



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