While much of the work on kernel Control Flow Integrity (CFI) is focused on arm64 (since kernel CFI is available on Android), a significant portion is in the core kernel itself (and especially the build system). Recently I got a sane build and boot on x86 with everything enabled, and I’ve been picking through some of the remaining pieces. I figured now would be a good time to document everything I do to get a build working in case other people want to play with it and find stuff that needs fixing.

First, everything is based on Sami Tolvanen’s upstream port of Clang’s forward-edge CFI, which includes his Link Time Optimization (LTO) work, which CFI requires. This tree also includes his backward-edge CFI work on arm64 with Clang’s Shadow Call Stack (SCS).

RFC Note:
  This is a RFC for folks who want to play with this early, because
  Herbert's cryptodev-2.6 tree hasn't yet made it into net-next. I'll
  repost this as a v1 (possibly with feedback incorporated) once the
  various trees are in the right place. This compiles on top of the
  Frankenzinc patchset from Ard, though it hasn't yet received suitable
  testing there for me to call it v1 just yet. Preliminary testing with
  the usual netns.sh test suite on x86 indicates it's at least mostly
  functional, but I'll be giving things further scrutiny in the days to
  come.

WireGuard is a layer 3 secure networking tunnel made specifically for
the kernel, that aims to be much simpler and easier to audit than IPsec.
Extensive documentation and description of the protocol and
considerations, along with formal proofs of the cryptography, are
available at:

  * https://www.wireguard.com/
  * https://www.wireguard.com/papers/wireguard.pdf

This commit implements WireGuard as a simple network device driver,
accessible in the usual RTNL way used by virtual network drivers. It
makes use of the udp_tunnel APIs, GRO, GSO, NAPI, and the usual set of
networking subsystem APIs. It has a somewhat novel multicore queueing
system designed for maximum throughput and minimal latency of encryption
operations, but it is implemented modestly using workqueues and NAPI.
Configuration is done via generic Netlink, and following a review from
the Netlink maintainer a year ago, several high profile userspace
have already implemented the API.

This commit also comes with several different tests, both in-kernel
tests and out-of-kernel tests based on network namespaces, taking profit
of the fact that sockets used by WireGuard intentionally stay in the
namespace the WireGuard interface was originally created, exactly like
the semantics of userspace tun devices. See wireguard.com/netns/ for
pictures and examples.

The source code is fairly short, but rather than combining everything
into a single file, WireGuard is developed as cleanly separable files,
making auditing and comprehension easier. Things are laid out as
follows:

  * noise.[ch], cookie.[ch], messages.h: These implement the bulk of the
    cryptographic aspects of the protocol, and are mostly data-only in
    nature, taking in buffers of bytes and spitting out buffers of
    bytes. They also handle reference counting for their various shared
    pieces of data, like keys and key lists.

  * ratelimiter.[ch]: Used as an integral part of cookie.[ch] for
    ratelimiting certain types of cryptographic operations in accordance
    with particular WireGuard semantics.

  * allowedips.[ch], peerlookup.[ch]: The main lookup structures of
    WireGuard, the former being trie-like with particular semantics, an
    integral part of the design of the protocol, and the latter just
    being nice helper functions around the various hashtables we use.

  * device.[ch]: Implementation of functions for the netdevice and for
    rtnl, responsible for maintaining the life of a given interface and
    wiring it up to the rest of WireGuard.

  * peer.[ch]: Each interface has a list of peers, with helper functions
    available here for creation, destruction, and reference counting.

  * socket.[ch]: Implementation of functions related to udp_socket and
    the general set of kernel socket APIs, for sending and receiving
    ciphertext UDP packets, and taking care of WireGuard-specific sticky
    socket routing semantics for the automatic roaming.

  * netlink.[ch]: Userspace API entry point for configuring WireGuard
    peers and devices. The API has been implemented by several userspace
    tools and network management utility, and the WireGuard project
    distributes the basic wg(8) tool.

  * queueing.[ch]: Shared function on the rx and tx path for handling
    the various queues used in the multicore algorithms.

  * send.c: Handles encrypting outgoing packets in parallel on
    multiple cores, before sending them in order on a single core, via
    workqueues and ring buffers. Also handles sending handshake and cookie
    messages as part of the protocol, in parallel.

  * receive.c: Handles decrypting incoming packets in parallel on
    multiple cores, before passing them off in order to be ingested via
    the rest of the networking subsystem with GRO via the typical NAPI
    poll function. Also handles receiving handshake and cookie messages
    as part of the protocol, in parallel.

  * timers.[ch]: Uses the timer wheel to implement protocol particular
    event timeouts, and gives a set of very simple event-driven entry
    point functions for callers.

  * main.c, version.h: Initialization and deinitialization of the module.

  * selftest/*.h: Runtime unit tests for some of the most security
    sensitive functions.

  * tools/testing/selftests/wireguard/netns.sh: Aforementioned testing
    script using network namespaces.

This commit aims to be as self-contained as possible, implementing
WireGuard as a standalone module not needing much special handling or
coordination from the network subsystem. I expect for future
optimizations to the network stack to positively improve WireGuard, and
vice-versa, but for the time being, this exists as intentionally
standalone.

We introduce a menu option for CONFIG_WIREGUARD, as well as providing a
verbose debug log and self-tests via CONFIG_WIREGUARD_DEBUG.

The long-awaited WireGuard secure VPN tunnel functionality looks like it will land with the Linux 5.6 kernel cycle happening in early 2020. Linux 5.5 is kicking off next week but the necessary crypto subsystem changes have yet to take place as well as a final sign-off on the new WireGuard code.

The blocker for the past long while on getting WireGuard merged into the Linux kernel was over its Zync cryptography code and needing to get that mainlined, which was proving difficult. While WireGuard was ready to fold and adopt to Linux's existing crypto API, in the interim crypto subsystem improvements making use of some Zinc design improvements materialized. It's those crypto improvements now expected to land soon in the Crypto development tree that in turn open the door for the WireGuard networking code itself to merge.