meson: mitigate against use of uninitialize stack for exploits

When variables are used without being initialized, there is potential
to take advantage of data that was pre-existing on the stack from an
earlier call, to drive an exploit.

It is good practice to always initialize variables, and the compiler
can warn about flaws when -Wuninitialized is present. This warning,
however, is by no means foolproof with its output varying depending
on compiler version and which optimizations are enabled.

The -ftrivial-auto-var-init option can be used to tell the compiler
to always initialize all variables. This increases the security and
predictability of the program, closing off certain attack vectors,
reducing the risk of unsafe memory disclosure.

While the option takes several possible values, using 'zero' is
considered to be the  option that is likely to lead to semantically
correct or safe behaviour[1]. eg sizes/indexes are not likely to
lead to out-of-bounds accesses when initialized to zero. Pointers
are less likely to point something useful if initialized to zero.

Even with -ftrivial-auto-var-init=zero set, GCC will still issue
warnings with -Wuninitialized if it discovers a problem, so we are
not loosing diagnostics for developers, just hardening runtime
behaviour and making QEMU behave more predictably in case of hitting
bad codepaths.

[1] https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/cfe-dev/2020-April/065221.html

Signed-off-by: "Daniel P. Berrangé" <berrange@redhat.com>
Message-ID: <20240103123414.2401208-3-berrange@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Huth <thuth@redhat.com>

diff --git a/meson.build b/meson.build
index 1bda391de66ddb6d088f5c5b15b834065446109b..d0329966f1b4900f2bff69ea4f93adb9fa8b4340 100644 (file)
--- a/meson.build
+++ b/meson.build
@@ -559,6 +559,11 @@ hardening_flags = [
     # upon its return. This makes it harder to assemble
     # ROP gadgets into something usable
     '-fzero-call-used-regs=used-gpr',
+
+    # Initialize all stack variables to zero. This makes
+    # it harder to take advantage of uninitialized stack
+    # data to drive exploits
+    '-ftrivial-auto-var-init=zero',
 ]
 
 qemu_common_flags += cc.get_supported_arguments(hardening_flags)