I added a section to the hardened malloc documentation on the chosen approach to memory tagging for slab allocations:
github.com/AndroidHardeni
In addition to guaranteed linear overflow detection, it will guarantee that use-after-free is detected until the tag wraps all the way.
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Despite only having 4 bit tags, it's guaranteed to take fairly long to wrap around due to the FIFO quarantine providing a guaranteed delay on reuse of the slot each time. The randomized portion of the quarantine and randomized slot / slab selection will give it even more value.
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The initial tag values will be randomly chosen via the same efficient ChaCha8 CSPRNG already used for several other purposes. Randomized tags provide a baseline of weak probabilistic heap corruption detection between any allocations, but deterministic guarantees are much nicer.
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It will also be possible to use memory tagging for large allocations, but those are already guaranteed to have randomly sized guard regions (at least 1 guard page) on each side and there's a virtual memory quarantine guaranteeing that address space isn't used again for a while.
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For large allocations it would be used solely as a probabilistic mitigation for accesses between allocations and to a lesser extent probabilistic use-after-free mitigation. They already get replaced with a PROT_NONE mapping via MAP_FIXED on free and that region is quarantined.
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On Linux, MAP_STACK is a no-op and secondary stack mappings are just a contiguous, static mapping like other mmap mappings so it doesn't really matter. The main thread stack is a special case and has a properly enforced gap that's not a PROT_NONE region so it can't grow into one.
The enforced gap is a special reserved area rather than an actual normal mapping. Secondary stacks are just a mapping made by the libc pthread_create implementation (or the caller, if they provide their own stack) with a guard region. I improved that in my past libc hardening.
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In my previous Bionic hardening, I added randomly sized guard regions on both ends similar to how I handle large allocations in the hardened allocator along with randomizing the stack pointer within the initial page to a certain extent up to a limit like 2% of available space.
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Yeah. I'm not a big fan of how Linux treats the stack. Their stack clash mitigation had several issues. FreeBSD's stack implementation is pretty nice, comparatively. :)
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The way it does secondary stacks is perfectly fine. I think the current main thread stack implementation is finally robust. It took many years for it to evolve into something without substantial issues though. I think needing to use MAP_GUARD everywhere probably isn't ideal.
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