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author | Eyal Itkin <eyalit@checkpoint.com> | 2019-12-27 18:45:20 +0200 |
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committer | Waldemar Brodkorb <wbx@openadk.org> | 2020-02-16 12:32:21 +0100 |
commit | 886878b22424d6f95bcdeee55ada72049d21547c (patch) | |
tree | c1ca8f9ac64bb6750e8b949635ec87963b454848 /librt | |
parent | 90f24fc94897d93deb80d933d18a4f31dc6bf05a (diff) |
Add Safe-Linking to fastbins
Safe-Linking is a security mechanism that protects single-linked
lists (such as the fastbins) from being tampered by attackers. The
mechanism makes use of randomness from ASLR (mmap_base), and when
combined with chunk alignment integrity checks, it protects the
pointers from being hijacked by an attacker.
While Safe-Unlinking protects double-linked lists (such as the small
bins), there wasn't any similar protection for attacks against
single-linked lists. This solution protects against 3 common attacks:
* Partial pointer override: modifies the lower bytes (Little Endian)
* Full pointer override: hijacks the pointer to an attacker's location
* Unaligned chunks: pointing the list to an unaligned address
The design assumes an attacker doesn't know where the heap is located,
and uses the ASLR randomness to "sign" the single-linked pointers. We
mark the pointer as P and the location in which it is stored as L, and
the calculation will be:
* PROTECT(P) := (L >> PAGE_SHIFT) XOR (P)
* *L = PROTECT(P)
This way, the random bits from the address L (which start at the bits
in the PAGE_SHIFT position), will be merged with the LSB of the stored
protected pointer. This protection layer prevents an attacker from
modifying the pointer into a controlled value.
An additional check that the chunks are MALLOC_ALIGNed adds an
important layer:
* Attackers can't point to illegal (unaligned) memory addresses
* Attackers must guess correctly the alignment bits
On standard 32 bit Linux machines, an attacker will directly fail 7
out of 8 times, and on 64 bit machines it will fail 15 out of 16
times.
The proposed solution adds 3-4 asm instructions per malloc()/free()
and therefore has only minor performance implications if it has
any. A similar protection was added to Chromium's version of TCMalloc
in 2013, and according to their documentation the performance overhead
was less than 2%.
Signed-off-by: Eyal Itkin <eyalit@checkpoint.com>
Diffstat (limited to 'librt')
0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions