x86: Turn the copy_from_user check into an (optional) compile time warning

A previous patch added the buffer size check to copy_from_user().

One of the things learned from analyzing the result of the previous
patch is that in general, gcc is really good at proving that the
code contains sufficient security checks to not need to do a
runtime check. But that for those cases where gcc could not prove
this, there was a relatively high percentage of real security
issues.

This patch turns the case of "gcc cannot prove" into a compile time
warning, as long as a sufficiently new gcc is in use that supports
this. The objective is that these warnings will trigger developers
checking new cases out before a security hole enters a linux kernel
release.

Signed-off-by: Arjan van de Ven <arjan@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: "David S. Miller" <davem@davemloft.net>
Cc: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
Cc: Jan Beulich <jbeulich@novell.com>
LKML-Reference: <20090930130523.348ae6c4@infradead.org>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>

1 files changed, 6 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/arch/x86/lib/usercopy_32.c b/arch/x86/lib/usercopy_32.c
index 8498684..e218d5d 100644
--- a/arch/x86/lib/usercopy_32.c
+++ b/arch/x86/lib/usercopy_32.c
@@ -883,3 +883,9 @@ _copy_from_user(void *to, const void __user *from, unsigned long n)
 	return n;
 }
 EXPORT_SYMBOL(_copy_from_user);
+
+void copy_from_user_overflow(void)
+{
+	WARN(1, "Buffer overflow detected!\n");
+}
+EXPORT_SYMBOL(copy_from_user_overflow);