RFC (round 1), JEP draft: Low-level Object layout introspection methods

Peter Levart peter.levart at gmail.com
Mon Aug 17 14:57:16 UTC 2020


On 8/17/20 2:55 PM, Michael Kuhlmann wrote:
> On 8/17/20 2:33 PM, Aleksey Shipilev wrote:
>> On 8/16/20 12:41 PM, Peter Levart wrote:
>>> On 8/11/20 12:22 PM, Aleksey Shipilev wrote:
>>>> ...but dislike:
>>>>       public static long addressOf(Object obj);
>>>>       public static long fieldOffsetOf(Field field);
>>> What exactly is the purpose of "addressOf" method in terms of
>>> information API? Is it used to estimate relative placement of several
>>> objects in the heap to see how they are scattered around which affects
>>> the CPU cache performance when accessing them?
>> Yes, it says so in "Motivation" section in JEP. Additionally, 
>> checking the object address against
>> the cache line size.
>>
>>> If this is the case, then maybe the method could return a "mangled"
>>> address: the address + some secret random value calculated once for the
>>> whole VM.
>> Now that is an interesting suggestion!
>>
>> Implemented here:
>>    https://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk/sandbox/rev/248807bfa78e
>>
>> There is little-to-none loss of performance, because the offset can 
>> be trivially used in intrinsics.
>> JEP text is updated to mention this technique. I believe this makes 
>> the address exposure story less
>> problematic, although the result is still conceptually a useful proxy 
>> for a memory location.
>>
>
> I don't fully get it. If the idea is that evil attackers shouldn't be 
> able to read confidential information from Java objects, then adding a 
> secret offset won't help. You can just create a unique object, e.g. an 
> array filled with some data, and scan the whole heap for that. Then 
> you can easily calculate the distance between this and any other 
> object and read or modify its content.
>
Yeah, you can do it if you are evil and have access to Unsafe also. This 
is not a security concern. It is a concern that otherwise kind people 
will start abusing the API to code useful programs that will later fail 
when the information API suddenly starts returning "unknown" values.

Regards, Peter




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