On 2/22/19 4:13 PM, Andrew Cooper wrote:
> vPMU isn't security supported, and in general guests can't access any of the
> performance counter MSRs.  However, the RDPMC instruction isn't intercepted,
> meaning that guest software can read the instantaneous counter values.
>
> When vPMU isn't configured, intercept RDPMC and unconditionally fail it as if
> software has requested a bad counter index (#GP fault).  It is model specific
> as to which counters are available to begin with, and in levelled scenarios,
> this information may not be accurate in the first place.
>
> This change isn't expected to have any impact on VMs.  Userspace is not
> usually given access to RDPMC (Windows appear to completely prohibit it; Linux
> is restricted to root), and kernels won't be executing RDPMC instructions if
> their PMU drivers have failed to start.
>
> Signed-off-by: Andrew Cooper <andrew.coop...@citrix.com>
> ---
> CC: Jan Beulich <jbeul...@suse.com>
> CC: Wei Liu <wei.l...@citrix.com>
> CC: Roger Pau Monné <roger....@citrix.com>
> CC: Jun Nakajima <jun.nakaj...@intel.com>
> CC: Kevin Tian <kevin.t...@intel.com>
> CC: Boris Ostrovsky <boris.ostrov...@oracle.com>
> CC: Suravee Suthikulpanit <suravee.suthikulpa...@amd.com>
> CC: Brian Woods <brian.wo...@amd.com>
> CC: Juergen Gross <jgr...@suse.com>
>
> This should be taken into Xen 4.12 and backported to the stable releases.
> While it isn't an XSA itself, it is an information leak (Xen's NMI watchdog in
> particular) which could be advantagous to an attacker trying to exploit a race
> condition.
>
> The only other option is to emulate the reported family and offer back all 0's
> for the accessable counters.  Obviously this is a non-starter.


When VPMU is off MSR reads return zero. While it is debatable whether
this the right action, shouldn't rdpmc behave in the same fashion?

-boris



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