Status: Upstream; in mainline since 5.12
Documentation: Documentation/dev-tools/kfence.rst
Found bugs: here
Contacts: Alexander Potapenko <@ramosian-glider>, Marco Elver <@melver>, Dmitry Vyukov <@dvyukov>
Kernel Electric-Fence (KFENCE) is a low-overhead sampling-based memory safety error detector for the Linux kernel. It detects heap out-of-bounds accessess, use-after-free, and invalid-free errors. It is designed to have negligible cost to permit enabling it in production environments.
KFENCE is inspired by GWP-ASan, a userspace tool with similar properties, and can be seen as its kernel sibling.
Compared to KASAN, KFENCE trades performance for precision. However, with enough total uptime KFENCE will detect bugs in code paths not typically exercised by non-production test workloads. One way to quickly achieve a large enough total uptime is to deploy the tool across a large fleet of machines. Indeed, KASAN and KFENCE are complementary, with different target environments. For instance, KASAN is the better debugging-aid, where a simple reproducer exists: due to the lower chance to detect the error, it would require more effort using KFENCE to debug. Deployments at scale, however, would benefit from using KFENCE to discover bugs due to code paths not exercised by test cases or fuzzers.
The name "KFENCE" is a homage to the Electric Fence Malloc Debugger.
To start using KFENCE, build your kernel with CONFIG_KFENCE=y. For more
information, please see the kernel's documentation.
KFENCE allocates a small pool of object pages (typically 4 KiB each) separated by guard (protected) pages. Each page contains at most one object, which is placed randomly at either end of that page. As a result, there is always a guard page next to a KFENCE-allocated object, so either a buffer-overflow or buffer-underflow on that object will result in a page fault. Such faults are then reported as out-of-bounds errors and printed to the kernel log.
Setting up whole pages for heap objects typically smaller than a whole page is costly, both in terms of memory but also performance overheads. Therefore, integration into the main heap allocators (SLAB or SLUB) is amortized by redirecting heap allocations to be allocated via KFENCE with a relatively low frequency (by default max. 2 allocations per second).
Upon redirecting a heap allocation to KFENCE, a page from the KFENCE pool freelist is obtained to prepare space for the requested object. Objects smaller than a full page are randomly placed at either end of the page. The object page is unprotected, and the unused portion of the page is set to a canary pattern to detect out-of-bounds writes within the object page itself. Various other metadata is stored to generate useful bug reports, such as the allocation stack trace. Finally, the address of the object is returned to the main allocator.
When an object is deallocated, KFENCE marks the corresponding page inaccessible, so that further accesses to that object will also result in a page fault, which will be reported as a use-after-free error. KFENCE also reports on invalid frees. The least recently freed objects will be reused for new allocations.
For more details, please see the documentation.