[RFT,v12,2/8] Documentation: userspace-api: Add shadow stack API documentation

Commit Message

Mark Brown Oct. 31, 2024, 7:25 p.m. UTC

There are a number of architectures with shadow stack features which we are
presenting to userspace with as consistent an API as we can (though there
are some architecture specifics). Especially given that there are some
important considerations for userspace code interacting directly with the
feature let's provide some documentation covering the common aspects.

Reviewed-by: Catalin Marinas <[e-mail]>
Reviewed-by: Kees Cook <[e-mail]>
Tested-by: Kees Cook <[e-mail]>
Acked-by: Shuah Khan <[e-mail]>
Signed-off-by: Mark Brown <[e-mail]>
---
 Documentation/userspace-api/index.rst        |  1 +
 Documentation/userspace-api/shadow_stack.rst | 42 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 2 files changed, 43 insertions(+)

Patch

diff --git a/Documentation/userspace-api/index.rst b/Documentation/userspace-api/index.rst
index 274cc7546efc2a042d2dc00aa67c71c52372179a..c39709bfba2c5682d0d1a22444db17c17bcf01ce 100644
--- a/Documentation/userspace-api/index.rst
+++ b/Documentation/userspace-api/index.rst
@@ -59,6 +59,7 @@  Everything else
 
    ELF
    netlink/index
+   shadow_stack
    sysfs-platform_profile
    vduse
    futex2
diff --git a/Documentation/userspace-api/shadow_stack.rst b/Documentation/userspace-api/shadow_stack.rst
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..9d0d4e79cfa7c47d3208dd53071a3d0b86c18575
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/userspace-api/shadow_stack.rst
@@ -0,0 +1,42 @@ 
+=============
+Shadow Stacks
+=============
+
+Introduction
+============
+
+Several architectures have features which provide backward edge
+control flow protection through a hardware maintained stack, only
+writeable by userspace through very limited operations.  This feature
+is referred to as shadow stacks on Linux, on x86 it is part of Intel
+Control Enforcement Technology (CET), on arm64 it is Guarded Control
+Stacks feature (FEAT_GCS) and for RISC-V it is the Zicfiss extension.
+It is expected that this feature will normally be managed by the
+system dynamic linker and libc in ways broadly transparent to
+application code, this document covers interfaces and considerations.
+
+
+Enabling
+========
+
+Shadow stacks default to disabled when a userspace process is
+executed, they can be enabled for the current thread with a syscall:
+
+ - For x86 the ARCH_SHSTK_ENABLE arch_prctl()
+ - For other architectures the PR_SET_SHADOW_STACK_ENABLE prctl()
+
+It is expected that this will normally be done by the dynamic linker.
+Any new threads created by a thread with shadow stacks enabled will
+themselves have shadow stacks enabled.
+
+
+Enablement considerations
+=========================
+
+- Returning from the function that enables shadow stacks without first
+  disabling them will cause a shadow stack exception.  This includes
+  any syscall wrapper or other library functions, the syscall will need
+  to be inlined.
+- A lock feature allows userspace to prevent disabling of shadow stacks.
+- Those that change the stack context like longjmp() or use of ucontext
+  changes on signal return will need support from libc.