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Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH v2] IOMMU: make DMA containment of quarantined devices optional



On 13.12.19 15:11, Jan Beulich wrote:
On 13.12.2019 14:46, Jürgen Groß wrote:
On 13.12.19 14:38, Jan Beulich wrote:
On 13.12.2019 14:31, Jürgen Groß wrote:
Maybe I have misunderstood the current state, but I thought that it
would just silently hide quirky devices without imposing a security
risk. We would not learn which devices are quirky, but OTOH I doubt
we'd get many reports about those in case your patch goes in.

We don't want or need such reports, that's not the point. The
security risk comes from the quirkiness of the devices - admins
may wrongly think all is well and expose quirky devices to not
sufficiently trusted guests. (I say this fully realizing that
exposing devices to untrusted guests is almost always a certain
level of risk.)

Do we _know_ those devices are problematic from security standpoint?
Normally the IOMMU should do the isolation just fine. If it doesn't
then its not the quirky device which is problematic, but the IOMMU.

I thought the problem was that the quirky devices would not stop all
(read) DMA even when being unassigned from the guest resulting in
fatal IOMMU faults. The dummy page should stop those faults to happen
resulting in a more stable system.

IOMMU faults by themselves are not impacting stability (they will
add processing overhead, yes). The problem, according to Paul's
description, is that the occurrence of at least some forms of IOMMU
faults (not present ones as it seems, as opposed to permission
violation ones) is fatal to certain systems. Irrespective of the
sink page used after de-assignment a guest can arrange for IOMMU
faults to occur even while it still has the device assigned. Hence
it is important for the admin to know that their system (not the
the particular device) behaves in this undesirable way.

So how does the admin learn this? Its not as if your patch would result
in a system crash or hang all the time, right? This would be the case
only if there either is a malicious (on purpose or due to a bug) guest
which gets the device assigned, or if there happens to be a pending DMA
operation when the device gets unassigned.

The malicious guest case would be caught without your patch as well.
And most cases of device unassignment would be fine, too, as a normal
guest shutdown/reboot includes stopping I/O activity.


So what are the security problems which are added by this behavior?

There are no problems added; there are problems hidden from admins.

In my understanding in some corner cases, yes.


Juergen

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