OpenBSD Journal

syscall call-from verification

Contributed by rueda on from the hard-as-nails-(in-the-coffin-of-exploit-techniques) dept.

Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) has committed code for a new exploit-prevention mechanism:

[…]
Repurpose the "syscalls must be on a writeable page" mechanism to
enforce a new policy: system calls must be in pre-registered regions.
We have discussed more strict checks than this, but none satisfy the
cost/benefit based upon our understanding of attack methods, anyways
let's see what the next iteration looks like.

This is intended to harden (translation: attackers must put extra
effort into attacking) against a mixture of W^X failures and JIT bugs
which allow syscall misinterpretation, especially in environments with
polymorphic-instruction/variable-sized instructions.  It fits in a bit
with libc/libcrypto/ld.so random relink on boot and no-restart-at-crash
behaviour, particularily for remote problems. Less effective once on-host
since someone the libraries can be read.
[…]

The full commit details are well worth reading, as is the manual page for the (new) msyscall(2), and some associated discussion on tech@.

As this change involves ABI breakage, upgrading via snapshots is the easiest way to avoid trouble.

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By brynet (Brynet) on https://brynet.biz.tm/

    Slight correction, Theo meant "syscalls must be on a un-writeable page" above.

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