oss-sec mailing list archives
Re: Healing the bash fork
From: Michal Zalewski <lcamtuf () coredump cx>
Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2014 17:04:31 -0700
I don't know if this can be made efficient enought to be practical, but imagine a virtual machine where every byte of memory is tagged with the security domain. When a byte is copied, the tag is copied also. (It is not possible in general to distinguish copies from writes, but at least when copying between domains via system calls, this is detectable.) Then, when a privileged program is running, its memory can be scanned for data from a lower privilege domain.
You're describing taint tracking, which is actually a pretty hard problem when you realize that data isn't an abstract, immutable entity, but rather something that is used as input for arithmetics, conditional branches, etc (is a byte set as a result of a tainted conditional also tainted? for far-reaching should this effect be?). But more fundamentally, in your example, what does it prove? In practical settings, privileged programs will routinely have data from lower (or at least other) privilege levels in memory, but that doesn't indicate a security problem. In particular, both the fixed and the vulnerable versions of bash will have that property when invoked via a servlet. /mz
Current thread:
- Re: Healing the bash fork Michal Zalewski (Sep 30)
- Re: Healing the bash fork Zach Wikholm (Sep 30)
- Re: Healing the bash fork Peter Bex (Sep 30)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Healing the bash fork Michal Zalewski (Sep 30)
- Re: Healing the bash fork Stuart D. Gathman (Oct 01)
- Re: Healing the bash fork Hanno Böck (Oct 01)
- Re: Healing the bash fork Jason Cooper (Oct 01)
- Re: Healing the bash fork Greg KH (Oct 01)
- Re: Healing the bash fork Jason Cooper (Oct 01)
- Re: Healing the bash fork Greg KH (Oct 01)
- Re: Healing the bash fork Loganaden Velvindron (Oct 01)
- Re: Healing the bash fork Colin Mahns (Oct 01)
- Re: Healing the bash fork Jason Cooper (Oct 01)
- Re: Healing the bash fork Zach Wikholm (Sep 30)
- Re: Healing the bash fork Florian Weimer (Oct 01)