Hello,

In the specification, section 5.4, after the definition of access there is a list of all accesses, and the missing combination is RWX. Someone else could comment here, this might have been a decision with security in mind, to avoid a writable section that is also executable. At least according to the spec, the owner could be sharing something else other than an RWX memory region.

A partition's manifest may contain memory regions that will be owned by the partition. The memory attributes for that memory is also specified in the manifest. My understanding is that there is nothing preventing that memory from being used for memory management operations, whilst having configuration different than RWX. Am I thinking correctly?

Also, currently the configuration of SCR_EL3.SIF (configured when booting TF-A) defines that no SWd component can execute from a NS memory segment. Does it make sense to enforce this at the 2nd stage of translation as well now that we are concerned with memory sharing between NWd and SWd? This is not to be changed now, but could be that SCR_EL3.SIF will need to be updated?

I think that making the memory management operations implementation generic (i.e. not tied to any assumption), would prevent the above points to be a problem, even if in practice what you say is the case (i.e. owned memory is always RWX) because that would also be preserved.

Best regards, João Alves

________________________________ From: Andrew Walbran Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2020 2:01 PM To: Joao Alves Cc: hafnium@lists.trustedfirmware.org Subject: Re: [Hafnium] FFA Memory Management Interfaces

Hello,

I still don't understand why a VM which owns a memory region and has exclusive access to it shouldn't have full RWX access permissions to it. What purpose does this serve? If the VM wants to restrict its own access it can do so with the permissions in its stage 1 page table. What other component should be controlling the VM's access to its own exclusively owned memory?

On Thu, 22 Oct 2020 at 10:31, Joao Alves <Joao.Alves@arm.commailto:Joao.Alves@arm.com> wrote: Hello Andrew,

Thank you for your addressing our questions on the previous email.

The section 5.4 of the spec defines ownership as "... software attribute that determines if a component can grant access to a memory region to anothercomponent." The same section also defines the accesses that a component may have on a memory region. I prepared the following patch: https://review.trustedfirmware.org/c/hafnium/hafnium/+/6521. It explicitly saves the access the sender had prior to the memory send operation, and restores that same value at a memory reclaim. This change makes the code generic, as it complies with all use-cases.

Also the patch: https://review.trustedfirmware.org/c/hafnium/hafnium/+/6471. Assuming the use-cases where the owner does not have execute permissions, the receiver's permissions will be set as NX if the Instruction Access is not specified.

Would you be able to review the changes? Let us know if you have any concerns regarding those patches.

Best regards, João Alves

________________________________ From: Andrew Walbran Sent: Tuesday, October 20, 2020 5:06 PM To: Olivier Deprez Cc: Joao Alves; hafnium@lists.trustedfirmware.orgmailto:hafnium@lists.trustedfirmware.org Subject: Re: [Hafnium] FFA Memory Management Interfaces

On Tue, 20 Oct 2020 at 16:51, Olivier Deprez <Olivier.Deprez@arm.commailto:Olivier.Deprez@arm.com> wrote: Hi Andrew,

On the first question it relates to this line https://review.trustedfirmware.org/c/hafnium/hafnium/+/6008/8/src/arch/aarch...

and whether we should map the "Hypervisor VM" pages as RWX provided a SP must never execute from an NS memory region. So it should never happen that a VM grants execute permissions to an NS buffer shared to a SP. I don't think it can happen if the memory region is shared, but why shouldn't an SP be allowed to retrieve a memory region donated or lent from a normal world VM to map as executable? Is there something in the FF-A spec that forbids that, or some reason we wouldn't want to allow it?

Or should this be enforced by the Relayer/SPMC on a mem retrieve that an NS memory region will always be mapped RW / NX?

Regards, Olivier.

________________________________________ From: Hafnium <hafnium-bounces@lists.trustedfirmware.orgmailto:hafnium-bounces@lists.trustedfirmware.org> on behalf of Andrew Walbran via Hafnium <hafnium@lists.trustedfirmware.orgmailto:hafnium@lists.trustedfirmware.org> Sent: 20 October 2020 17:37 To: Joao Alves Cc: hafnium@lists.trustedfirmware.orgmailto:hafnium@lists.trustedfirmware.org Subject: Re: [Hafnium] FFA Memory Management Interfaces

On Tue, 20 Oct 2020 at 11:18, Joao Alves <Joao.Alves@arm.commailto:Joao.Alves@arm.com> wrote:

Hello All,

We have been working on enabling the use memory management interfaces between SWd and NWd, on Hafnium as SPMC. We identified a few points that would benefit from a general discussion/clarification through the Mailing List for this work to progress on time for the first release.

The whole memory has been mapped to a VM representative of the NWd FFA endpoints (in the code can be found as a global variable called 'other_world_vm') in this patch https://review.trustedfirmware.org/c/hafnium/hafnium/+/6008. All the memory is configured as RW memory, to be permissive enough to ease the validation of the sender's original permissions vs the requested sharing permissions. This approach seems valid given the following assumptions: the 'other_world_vm' is never scheduled, which means that there is no risk of memory leakage; the hypervisor should do the necessary validation of the permissions that a given NWd FFA endpoint has on a given memory region, before forwarding the handling of the operation to the SPMC.

The first point to bring to discussion is regarding the RW configuration.

*Is this really the best configuration we would expect for memory to be shared from NWd to the SWd? Or is this excluding any use-case we are not aware of (e.g. at this point we are restricting instruction permissions to NX)?*

Is there any reason we need to restrict it to NX? Usually a VM owning memory implies that it has full RWX access to it, as it would without a hypervisor involved. We assume that it should be able to grant any subset of those permissions when donating or lending the memory, subject to FF-A or other policy restrictions.

Whilst testing the memory management interfaces, I noticed that if the

instruction access on the memory region descriptor (in the spec has been described in section 5.12, and in the code defined as 'struct ffa_memory_region') is set as 'not specified' for the Lend and Donate operations, the receiver would acquire permission to execute the memory region. This is due to the implementation of the function ' ffa_memory_permissions_to_mode https://git.trustedfirmware.org/hafnium/hafnium.git/tree/src/ffa_memory.c#n393 https://git.trustedfirmware.org/hafnium/hafnium.git/tree/src/ffa_memory.c#n393', which sets the memory mode to MM_MODE_X for case instruction access FFA_INSTRUCTION_ACCESS_NOT_SPECIFIED. My understanding is that in such case MM_MODE_X shouldn't be set. Please check this change https://review.trustedfirmware.org/c/hafnium/hafnium/+/6008. *@Andrew Walbran <qwandor@google.commailto:qwandor@google.com>, is the change I provided correct? Or is there a reason for the current implementation of 'ffa_memory_permissions_to_mode'?*

Again, the assumption is that the owner of a page always has full access to it. From the FF-A spec, section 5.11.2.2 says "In a transaction to donate memory... if the receiver is a PE, the owner must not specify the level of access". Section 5.11.3.2 says the same thing for the execute permission in the case of donating or lending to a single borrower. The spec says that the retriever should specify the permissions it wants, but it is not required. So in these cases the retriever may specify any permissions, and if it doesn't specify any then we give it full access.

I also noticed that after a memory reclaim, the sender/owner of a memory

region acquires RW and X permissions, even if these were not part of the original permissions when sending the memory region. This is due to definition of the variable 'memory_to_attributes' in the function ' ffa_memory_reclaim https://git.trustedfirmware.org/hafnium/hafnium.git/tree/src/ffa_memory.c#n2576 ': uint32_t memory_to_attributes = MM_MODE_R | MM_MODE_W | MM_MODE_X; Down the call stack, the value of this variable is used to update the variable 'to_mode' in function 'ffa_retrieve_check_transition https://git.trustedfirmware.org/hafnium/hafnium.git/tree/src/ffa_memory.c#n665'. The value of variable 'to_mode' is later passed to 'ffa_region_group_identity_map' https://git.trustedfirmware.org/hafnium/hafnium.git/tree/src/ffa_memory.c#n1018 to update the owner's memory mapping. My understanding is that the sender's memory mode should be reset to the mode it had prior to the original memory send operation, and that this is going to be a problem for memory management operations (even between between VMs and between SPs). I have seen this behavior on my set, however I would like to validate my analysis. *@Andrew Walbran <qwandor@google.commailto:qwandor@google.com> would you be able to provide any comments on this?*

Our assumption, as above, is that the initial owner of a page starts with full access to it, and so this is what should be restored when it is reclaimed.

Please let me know if anyone has any comments/questions.

Best regards, João Alves