On Tue, 24 Sep 2024, Akilesh Kailash wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 24, 2024 at 10:44 AM Sami Tolvanen <samitolva...@google.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Hi Mikulas,
> >
> > On Tue, Sep 24, 2024 at 6:18 AM Mikulas Patocka <mpato...@redhat.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > Maxim Suhanov reported that dm-verity doesn't crash if an I/O error
> > > happens. In theory, this could be used to subvert security, because an
> > > attacker can create sectors that return error with the Write Uncorrectable
> > > command. Some programs may misbehave if they have to deal with EIO.
> >
> > I seem to recall that this was intentional. We used to restart/panic
> > on I/O errors with FEC enabled, but the behavior was changed in commit
> > 2c0468e054c0 ("dm verity: skip redundant verity_handle_err() on I/O
> > errors"). Akilesh, do you remember what exactly was the issue here?
> >
>
> I looked at the history and the original intent and the idea stems
> from this patch:
> https://lore.kernel.org/dm-devel/b004e7c7-f795-77ed-19b9-983785780...@gmail.com/T/#mec4df1ba3f3cb63846875fb2bfc1f8b3100f31f1
>
> I think the EIO should be propagated back up the stack; I think this
> will trigger panic
> even for genuine I/O errors.
Maxim Suhanov's point is that you should trigger panic for genuine I/O
errors. Otherwise the attacker could corrupt some sectors and let some
program receive EIO and the EIO could confuse the program to do something
insecure (for example, to not load a configuration file with security
policy).
Mikulas
