The overhead of running Seccomp filters has been part of some past
discussions [1][2][3]. Oftentimes, the filters have a large number
of instructions that check syscall numbers one by one and jump based
on that. Some users chain BPF filters which further enlarge the
overhead. A recent work [6] comprehensively measures the Seccomp
overhead and shows that the overhead is non-negligible and has a
non-trivial impact on application performance.
We observed some common filters, such as docker's [4] or
systemd's [5], will make most decisions based only on the syscall
numbers, and as past discussions considered, a bitmap where each bit
represents a syscall makes most sense for these filters.
The fast (common) path for seccomp should be that the filter permits
the syscall to pass through, and failing seccomp is expected to be
an exceptional case; it is not expected for userspace to call a
denylisted syscall over and over.
When it can be concluded that an allow must occur for the given
architecture and syscall pair (this determination is introduced in
the next commit), seccomp will immediately allow the syscall,
bypassing further BPF execution.
Each architecture number has its own bitmap. The architecture
number in seccomp_data is checked against the defined architecture
number constant before proceeding to test the bit against the
bitmap with the syscall number as the index of the bit in the
bitmap, and if the bit is set, seccomp returns allow. The bitmaps
are all clear in this patch and will be initialized in the next
commit.
When only one architecture exists, the check against architecture
number is skipped, suggested by Kees Cook [7].
[1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-security-module/c22a6c3cefc2412cad00ae14c1371711@huawei.com/T/
[2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/202005181120.971232B7B@keescook/T/
[3] https://github.com/seccomp/libseccomp/issues/116
[4] ae0ef82b90/profiles/seccomp/default.json
[5] 6743a1caf4/src/shared/seccomp-util.c (L270)
[6] Draco: Architectural and Operating System Support for System Call Security
https://tianyin.github.io/pub/draco.pdf, MICRO-53, Oct. 2020
[7] https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/202010091614.8BB0EB64@keescook/
Co-developed-by: Dimitrios Skarlatos <dskarlat@cs.cmu.edu>
Signed-off-by: Dimitrios Skarlatos <dskarlat@cs.cmu.edu>
Signed-off-by: YiFei Zhu <yifeifz2@illinois.edu>
Reviewed-by: Jann Horn <jannh@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/10f91a367ec4fcdea7fc3f086de3f5f13a4a7436.1602431034.git.yifeifz2@illinois.edu
(cherry picked from commit f9d480b6ffbeb336bf7f6ce44825c00f61b3abae)A
Signed-off-by: Jeff Vander Stoep <jeffv@google.com>
Change-Id: I50b6682e17dc6e91b5e92017361200d722282825
Bug: 176068146
993d91ceea