CVE-2021-47277

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

kvm: avoid speculation-based attacks from out-of-range memslot accesses

KVM's mechanism for accessing guest memory translates a guest physical address (gpa) to a host virtual address using the right-shifted gpa (also known as gfn) and a struct kvmmemoryslot. The translation is performed in _gfntohvamemslot using the following formula:

  hva = slot->userspace_addr + (gfn - slot->base_gfn) * PAGE_SIZE

It is expected that gfn falls within the boundaries of the guest's physical memory. However, a guest can access invalid physical addresses in such a way that the gfn is invalid.

_gfntohvamemslot is called from kvmvcpugfntohvaprot, which first retrieves a memslot through _gfntomemslot. While _gfnto_memslot does check that the gfn falls within the boundaries of the guest's physical memory or not, a CPU can speculate the result of the check and continue execution speculatively using an illegal gfn. The speculation can result in calculating an out-of-bounds hva. If the resulting host virtual address is used to load another guest physical address, this is effectively a Spectre gadget consisting of two consecutive reads, the second of which is data dependent on the first.

Right now it's not clear if there are any cases in which this is exploitable. One interesting case was reported by the original author of this patch, and involves visiting guest page tables on x86. Right now these are not vulnerable because the hva read goes through getuser(), which contains an LFENCE speculation barrier. However, there are patches in progress for x86 uaccess.h to mask kernel addresses instead of using LFENCE; once these land, a guest could use speculation to read from the VMM's ring 3 address space. Other architectures such as ARM already use the address masking method, and would be susceptible to this same kind of data-dependent access gadgets. Therefore, this patch proactively protects from these attacks by masking out-of-bounds gfns in _gfntohva_memslot, which blocks speculation of invalid hvas.

Sean Christopherson noted that this patch does not cover kvmreadguestoffsetcached. This however is limited to a few bytes past the end of the cache, and therefore it is unlikely to be useful in the context of building a chain of data dependent accesses.