Full Disclosure mailing list archives
Re: linux bugs (survival stories)?
From: Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu
Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2005 14:26:34 -0400
On Tue, 12 Apr 2005 12:06:59 +0545, Bipin Gautam said:
every to verify its types) On the other hand we have had products like stack guard, lib safe, grsecurity.net, se-linux
BUT i was woundering, to what extent adding these extra security measures are effective against the real attacks & bugs discovered in the kernel.
They do almost nothing to guard against bugs discovered *in the kernel*, because all of them are addressing *userspace* bugs. There's pretty much *zero* you can do to protect against kernel bugs, other than audit the code and get rid of the bugs. Remember it's basically a monolithic kernel - that means that if a bug lets somebody get control of the kernel, it's Game Over. There's a reason why binary kernel modules are frowned upon - and it's precisely that. As far as the kernel is concerned, a security bug and a buggy binary module are the same thing - both can go scribbling on whatever kernel data structures it wants to, and there's no real way to stop it. If anybody wants a good kernel-auditing project, just start going through the 2.6.12-rc2 tree and look at uses of copy_from_user(), and make sure that each use of that function then proceeds to *validate* the data (especially in the various driver's .ioctl methods - historically a place for issues). At least the tree seems to be a lot better with not ignoring the return value of copy_from_user() ;)
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Current thread:
- linux bugs (survival stories)? Bipin Gautam (Apr 11)
- Re: linux bugs (survival stories)? Valdis . Kletnieks (Apr 12)
- Re: linux bugs (survival stories)? Georgi Guninski (Apr 12)
- Re: linux bugs (survival stories)? dk (Apr 12)
- Re: linux bugs (survival stories)? Eduardo Tongson (Apr 12)
- Re: linux bugs (survival stories)? Valdis . Kletnieks (Apr 12)
- Re: linux bugs (survival stories)? Eduardo Tongson (Apr 12)
- Re: linux bugs (survival stories)? Joachim Schipper (Apr 12)
- Re: linux bugs (survival stories)? Valdis . Kletnieks (Apr 12)
- Re: linux bugs (survival stories)? Eduardo Tongson (Apr 13)
- Re: linux bugs (survival stories)? Valdis . Kletnieks (Apr 12)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: linux bugs (survival stories)? pageexec (Apr 12)
- Re: linux bugs (survival stories)? Valdis . Kletnieks (Apr 12)