KASLR support on ARM with Kernel 4.9 and 4.14

[Pintu Agarwal]

On Mon, 28 Sep 2020 at 19:15, Pintu Agarwal <pintu.ping at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Sat, 26 Sep 2020 at 22:10, Kees Cook <keescook at chromium.org> wrote:
>
> > > >> I wonder if this is an Android Common kernel?
> > > It uses the below kernel for 4.14:
> > > https://gitlab.com/quicla/kernel/msm-4.14/-/tree/LE.UM.3.4.2.r1.5  (or
> > > similar branch).
> >
> > Okay, so yes. And this appears to have the hashing of %p backported. I
> > cannot, however, explain why it's showing hashed pointers instead of
> > just NULL, though.
> >
> > It might be related to these commits but they're not in that kernel:
> > 3e5903eb9cff ("vsprintf: Prevent crash when dereferencing invalid pointers")
> > 7bd57fbc4a4d ("vsprintf: don't obfuscate NULL and error pointers")
> >
> > > ==> The case where symbol addresses are changing.
> > >
> > > kptr_restrict is set to 2 by default:
> > > / # cat /proc/sys/kernel/kptr_restrict
> > > 2
> > >
> > > Basically, the goal is:
> > > * To understand how addresses are changing in 4.14 Kernel (without
> > > KASLR support)?
> > > * Is it possible to support the same in 4.9 Kernel ?
> >
> > Try setting kptr_restrict to 0 and see if the symbol addresses change? I
> > suspect Ard is correct: there's no KASLR here, just hashed pointers
> > behaving weird on an old non-stock kernel. :)
> >
>
> Okay. Thank you so much for your comments and suggestions.
> You mean to say, setting kptr_restrict to 0 may avoid changing symbol
> addresses in 4.14 ?
> And, sorry, I could not understand the thing about this "hashed pointers".
> How can I check this behavior in source code to understand better?
> Is it possible to give some reference ?
> I wanted to disable this hash pointer on 4.14 kernel and check the behavior.
> Also if possible, we would like to make this similar change on 4.9
> kernel as well.
>

Okay, I found these changes in 4.14 kernel:
https://gitlab.com/quicla/kernel/msm-4.14/-/commit/e63732dbfe017aa0dbabac9d096b5fde8afbd395

Are we talking about this?
I cound not find this in 4.9 kernel.

I will disable kptr_restrict and check or, I will enable
CONFIG_DEBUG_CONSOLE_UNHASHED_POINTERS and check.


Thanks,
Pintu