BugLink: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1884564

[ Upstream commit 21998a35 ]

When STIBP is unavailable or enhanced IBRS is available, Linux
force-disables the IBPB mitigation of Spectre-BTB even when simultaneous
multithreading is disabled. While attempts to enable IBPB using
prctl(PR_SET_SPECULATION_CTRL, PR_SPEC_INDIRECT_BRANCH, ...) fail with
EPERM, the seccomp syscall (or its prctl(PR_SET_SECCOMP, ...) equivalent)
which are used e.g. by Chromium or OpenSSH succeed with no errors but the
application remains silently vulnerable to cross-process Spectre v2 attacks
(classical BTB poisoning). At the same time the SYSFS reporting
(/sys/devices/system/cpu/vulnerabilities/spectre_v2) displays that IBPB is
conditionally enabled when in fact it is unconditionally disabled.

STIBP is useful only when SMT is enabled. When SMT is disabled and STIBP is
unavailable, it makes no sense to force-disable also IBPB, because IBPB
protects against cross-process Spectre-BTB attacks regardless of the SMT
state. At the same time since missing STIBP was only observed on AMD CPUs,
AMD does not recommend using STIBP, but recommends using IBPB, so disabling
IBPB because of missing STIBP goes directly against AMD's advice:
https://developer.amd.com/wp-content/resources/Architecture_Guidelines_Update_Indirect_Branch_Control.pdf

Similarly, enhanced IBRS is designed to protect cross-core BTB poisoning
and BTB-poisoning attacks from user space against kernel (and
BTB-poisoning attacks from guest against hypervisor), it is not designed
to prevent cross-process (or cross-VM) BTB poisoning between processes (or
VMs) running on the same core. Therefore, even with enhanced IBRS it is
necessary to flush the BTB during context-switches, so there is no reason
to force disable IBPB when enhanced IBRS is available.

Enable the prctl control of IBPB even when STIBP is unavailable or enhanced
IBRS is available.

Fixes: 7cc765a6 ("x86/speculation: Enable prctl mode for spectre_v2_user")
Signed-off-by: Anthony Steinhauser <asteinhauser@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin <sashal@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Kamal Mostafa <kamal@canonical.com>
Signed-off-by: Khalid Elmously <khalid.elmously@canonical.com>