Unexpected exec permission from mmap when assembly files included in the project

Linux has an execution domain called READ_IMPLIES_EXEC, which causes all pages allocated with PROT_READ to also be given PROT_EXEC. Older Linux kernels used to use this for executables that used the equivalent of gcc -z execstack. This program will show you whether that's enabled for itself:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/personality.h>

int main(void) {
    printf("Read-implies-exec is %s\n", personality(0xffffffff) & READ_IMPLIES_EXEC ? "true" : "false");
    return 0;
}

If you compile that along with an empty .s file, you'll see that it's enabled, but without one, it'll be disabled. The initial value of this comes from the ELF meta-information in your binary. Do readelf -Wl example. You'll see this line when you compiled without the empty .s file:

  GNU_STACK      0x000000 0x0000000000000000 0x0000000000000000 0x000000 0x000000 RW  0x10

But this one when you compiled with it:

  GNU_STACK      0x000000 0x0000000000000000 0x0000000000000000 0x000000 0x000000 RWE 0x10

Note RWE instead of just RW. The reason for this is that the linker assumes that your assembly files require read-implies-exec unless it's explicitly told that they don't, and if any part of your program requires read-implies-exec, then it's enabled for your whole program. The assembly files that GCC compiles tell it that it doesn't need this, with this line (you'll see this if you compile with -S):

    .section        .note.GNU-stack,"",@progbits

The default section permissions don't include exec. See the ELF part of the .section documentation for the meaning of the "flags" and @attributes.

(And don't forget to switch to another section like .text or .data after that .section directive, if your .s was relying on .text because the default section at the top of the file.)

Put that line in example.s (and every other .s file in your project). The presence of that .note.GNU-stack section will serve to tell the linker that this object file doesn't depend on an executable stack, so the linker will use RW instead of RWE on the GNU_STACK metadata, and your program will then work as expected.

Similarly for NASM, a section directive with the right flags specifies non-executable stacks.

Modern Linux kernels between 5.4 and 5.8 changed the behaviour of the ELF program-loader. For x86-64, nothing turns on READ_IMPLIES_EXEC anymore. At most (with an RWE GNU_STACK added by ld), you'll get the stack itself being executable, not every readable page. (This answer covers the last change, in 5.8, but there must have been other changes before that, since that question shows successful execution of code in .data on x86-64 Linux 5.4)

exec-all (READ_IMPLIES_EXEC) only happens for legacy 32-bit executables where the linker didn't add a GNU_STACK header entry at all. But as shown here, modern ld always adds that with one setting or the other, even when an input .o file is missing a note.

You should still use this .note section to signal non-executable stacks in normal programs. But if you were hoping to test self-modifying code in .data or following some old tutorial for testing shellcode, that's not an option on modern kernels.

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As an alternative to modifying your assembly files with GNU-specific section directive variants, you can add -Wa,--noexecstack to your command line for building assembly files. For example, see how I do it in musl's configure:

https://git.musl-libc.org/cgit/musl/commit/configure?id=adefe830dd376be386df5650a09c313c483adf1a

I believe at least some versions of clang with integrated-assembler may require it to be passed as --noexecstack (without the -Wa), so your configure script should probably check both and see which is accepted.

You can also use -Wl,-z,noexecstack at link time (in LDFLAGS) to get the same result. The disadvantage of this is that it doesn't help if your project produces static (.a) library files for use by other software, since you then don't control the link-time options when it's used by other programs.

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