This is PATCH v1 for KASLR memory implementation on x86_64. Minor changes were done based on RFC v1 comments.
***Background: The current implementation of KASLR randomizes only the base address of the kernel and its modules. Research was published showing that static memory can be overwitten to elevate privileges bypassing KASLR. In more details: The physical memory mapping holds most allocations from boot and heap allocators. Knowning the base address and physical memory size, an attacker can deduce the PDE virtual address for the vDSO memory page. This attack was demonstrated at CanSecWest 2016, in the "Getting Physical Extreme Abuse of Intel Based Paged Systems" https://goo.gl/ANpWdV (see second part of the presentation). Similar research was done at Google leading to this patch proposal. Variants exists to overwrite /proc or /sys objects ACLs leading to elevation of privileges. These variants were tested against 4.6+. This set of patches randomizes base address and padding of three major memory sections (physical memory mapping, vmalloc & vmemmap). It mitigates exploits relying on predictable kernel addresses. This feature can be enabled with the CONFIG_RANDOMIZE_MEMORY option. Padding for the memory hotplug support is managed by CONFIG_RANDOMIZE_MEMORY_PHYSICAL_PADDING. The default value is 10 terabytes. The patches were tested on qemu & physical machines. Xen compatibility was also verified. Multiple reboots were used to verify entropy for each memory section. ***Problems that needed solving: - The three target memory sections are never at the same place between boots. - The physical memory mapping can use a virtual address not aligned on the PGD page table. - Have good entropy early at boot before get_random_bytes is available. - Add optional padding for memory hotplug compatibility. ***Parts: - The first part prepares for the KASLR memory randomization by refactoring entropy functions used by the current implementation and support PUD level virtual addresses for physical mapping. (Patches 01-02) - The second part implements the KASLR memory randomization for all sections mentioned. (Patch 03) - The third part adds support for memory hotplug by adding an option to define the padding used between the physical memory mapping section and the others. (Patch 04) Thanks! -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-doc" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html