d07e22597d
Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) provides a barrier to exploitation of user-space processes in the presence of security vulnerabilities by making it more difficult to find desired code/data which could help an attack. This is done by adding a random offset to the location of regions in the process address space, with a greater range of potential offset values corresponding to better protection/a larger search-space for brute force, but also to greater potential for fragmentation. The offset added to the mmap_base address, which provides the basis for the majority of the mappings for a process, is set once on process exec in arch_pick_mmap_layout() and is done via hard-coded per-arch values, which reflect, hopefully, the best compromise for all systems. The trade-off between increased entropy in the offset value generation and the corresponding increased variability in address space fragmentation is not absolute, however, and some platforms may tolerate higher amounts of entropy. This patch introduces both new Kconfig values and a sysctl interface which may be used to change the amount of entropy used for offset generation on a system. The direct motivation for this change was in response to the libstagefright vulnerabilities that affected Android, specifically to information provided by Google's project zero at: http://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2015/09/stagefrightened.html The attack presented therein, by Google's project zero, specifically targeted the limited randomness used to generate the offset added to the mmap_base address in order to craft a brute-force-based attack. Concretely, the attack was against the mediaserver process, which was limited to respawning every 5 seconds, on an arm device. The hard-coded 8 bits used resulted in an average expected success rate of defeating the mmap ASLR after just over 10 minutes (128 tries at 5 seconds a piece). With this patch, and an accompanying increase in the entropy value to 16 bits, the same attack would take an average expected time of over 45 hours (32768 tries), which makes it both less feasible and more likely to be noticed. The introduced Kconfig and sysctl options are limited by per-arch minimum and maximum values, the minimum of which was chosen to match the current hard-coded value and the maximum of which was chosen so as to give the greatest flexibility without generating an invalid mmap_base address, generally a 3-4 bits less than the number of bits in the user-space accessible virtual address space. When decided whether or not to change the default value, a system developer should consider that mmap_base address could be placed anywhere up to 2^(value) bits away from the non-randomized location, which would introduce variable-sized areas above and below the mmap_base address such that the maximum vm_area_struct size may be reduced, preventing very large allocations. This patch (of 4): ASLR only uses as few as 8 bits to generate the random offset for the mmap base address on 32 bit architectures. This value was chosen to prevent a poorly chosen value from dividing the address space in such a way as to prevent large allocations. This may not be an issue on all platforms. Allow the specification of a minimum number of bits so that platforms desiring greater ASLR protection may determine where to place the trade-off. Signed-off-by: Daniel Cashman <dcashman@google.com> Cc: Russell King <linux@arm.linux.org.uk> Acked-by: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org> Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org> Cc: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net> Cc: Don Zickus <dzickus@redhat.com> Cc: Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com> Cc: Heinrich Schuchardt <xypron.glpk@gmx.de> Cc: Josh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@redhat.com> Cc: Kirill A. Shutemov <kirill.shutemov@linux.intel.com> Cc: Naoya Horiguchi <n-horiguchi@ah.jp.nec.com> Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com> Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com> Cc: Mark Salyzyn <salyzyn@android.com> Cc: Jeff Vander Stoep <jeffv@google.com> Cc: Nick Kralevich <nnk@google.com> Cc: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com> Cc: Will Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com> Cc: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com> Cc: Hector Marco-Gisbert <hecmargi@upv.es> Cc: Borislav Petkov <bp@suse.de> Cc: Ralf Baechle <ralf@linux-mips.org> Cc: Heiko Carstens <heiko.carstens@de.ibm.com> Cc: Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com> Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> |
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| abi.txt | ||
| fs.txt | ||
| kernel.txt | ||
| net.txt | ||
| README | ||
| sunrpc.txt | ||
| vm.txt | ||
Documentation for /proc/sys/ kernel version 2.2.10 (c) 1998, 1999, Rik van Riel <riel@nl.linux.org> 'Why', I hear you ask, 'would anyone even _want_ documentation for them sysctl files? If anybody really needs it, it's all in the source...' Well, this documentation is written because some people either don't know they need to tweak something, or because they don't have the time or knowledge to read the source code. Furthermore, the programmers who built sysctl have built it to be actually used, not just for the fun of programming it :-) ============================================================== Legal blurb: As usual, there are two main things to consider: 1. you get what you pay for 2. it's free The consequences are that I won't guarantee the correctness of this document, and if you come to me complaining about how you screwed up your system because of wrong documentation, I won't feel sorry for you. I might even laugh at you... But of course, if you _do_ manage to screw up your system using only the sysctl options used in this file, I'd like to hear of it. Not only to have a great laugh, but also to make sure that you're the last RTFMing person to screw up. In short, e-mail your suggestions, corrections and / or horror stories to: <riel@nl.linux.org> Rik van Riel. ============================================================== Introduction: Sysctl is a means of configuring certain aspects of the kernel at run-time, and the /proc/sys/ directory is there so that you don't even need special tools to do it! In fact, there are only four things needed to use these config facilities: - a running Linux system - root access - common sense (this is especially hard to come by these days) - knowledge of what all those values mean As a quick 'ls /proc/sys' will show, the directory consists of several (arch-dependent?) subdirs. Each subdir is mainly about one part of the kernel, so you can do configuration on a piece by piece basis, or just some 'thematic frobbing'. The subdirs are about: abi/ execution domains & personalities debug/ <empty> dev/ device specific information (eg dev/cdrom/info) fs/ specific filesystems filehandle, inode, dentry and quota tuning binfmt_misc <Documentation/binfmt_misc.txt> kernel/ global kernel info / tuning miscellaneous stuff net/ networking stuff, for documentation look in: <Documentation/networking/> proc/ <empty> sunrpc/ SUN Remote Procedure Call (NFS) vm/ memory management tuning buffer and cache management These are the subdirs I have on my system. There might be more or other subdirs in another setup. If you see another dir, I'd really like to hear about it :-)