[Cryptography] WIPEONFORK in Linux 4.14

[Colm MacCárthaigh]

On Mon, Nov 27, 2017 at 12:09 PM, Nico Williams <nico at cryptonector.com>
wrote:

> Right.  One should not, however, call syscall(2) to avoid libc stubs.
> It's very dangerous for precisely this sort of reason.
>

Dangerous but attractive can be a bad combination; there are runtimes and
VMs that use the syscalls directly because they want to emulate their own
lightweight processes. For their environment, it makes sense - to them.
Then sometimes these same environments will also embed a native crypto
library, for performance reasons, and we have an unsafe combination of
events if the native library is relying on pthread_atfork. Everyone is
doing something that mostly makes sense "for them", but users can still end
up with an insecure combination.

> What should work as an MADV_WIPEONFORK replacement is a MAP_SHARED
> > mapping and two counters, [...]
>
> Clever.  You can also just check that (my_saved_pid == getpid()), which
> if you have a fast getpid() via a vdso, is cheap.
>

This isn't safe because PIDs can be re-used.

-- 
Colm
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