fork: record start_time late

This changes the fork(2) syscall to record the process start_time after
initializing the basic task structure but still before making the new
process visible to user-space.

Technically, we could record the start_time anytime during fork(2).  But
this might lead to scenarios where a start_time is recorded long before
a process becomes visible to user-space.  For instance, with
userfaultfd(2) and TLS, user-space can delay the execution of fork(2)
for an indefinite amount of time (and will, if this causes network
access, or similar).

By recording the start_time late, it much closer reflects the point in
time where the process becomes live and can be observed by other
processes.

Lastly, this makes it much harder for user-space to predict and control
the start_time they get assigned.  Previously, user-space could fork a
process and stall it in copy_thread_tls() before its pid is allocated,
but after its start_time is recorded.  This can be misused to later-on
cycle through PIDs and resume the stalled fork(2) yielding a process
that has the same pid and start_time as a process that existed before.
This can be used to circumvent security systems that identify processes
by their pid+start_time combination.

Even though user-space was always aware that start_time recording is
flaky (but several projects are known to still rely on start_time-based
identification), changing the start_time to be recorded late will help
mitigate existing attacks and make it much harder for user-space to
control the start_time a process gets assigned.

Reported-by: Jann Horn <jannh@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Tom Gundersen <teg@jklm.no>
Signed-off-by: David Herrmann <dh.herrmann@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions