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From: Dan Rosenberg <drosenberg@vsecurity.com>
To: linux-crypto@vger.kernel.org
Subject: [CRYPTO] obfuscating kernel pointers
Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2010 08:32:01 -0500	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <1289568721.3090.267.camel@Dan> (raw)

Hi Crypto people,

I'm planning on submitting a patch that introduces a new %p format
specifier that obfuscates kernel pointers depending on privileges.  This
change is for security reasons - many networking protocols expose
pointers to socket structures in their /proc interfaces, which are
attractive targets when exploiting other issues.

It's been suggested that I initialize a secret value at boot, and use
that as the key to a crypto hash function.  I should use a function that
is relatively fast (ideally), produces a unique output based on its
input of a pointer, and produces consistent output when given the same
input.  It should be difficult to infer the input given only the output.

I have two questions:

1. What is a proper, safe way of initializing a random value at boot?
Are there any existing examples that do this?

2. Can you recommend a crypto algorithm that would be well suited for
this pointer obfuscation?

Thanks,
Dan

             reply	other threads:[~2010-11-12 13:38 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 9+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2010-11-12 13:32 Dan Rosenberg [this message]
2010-11-12 17:27 ` [CRYPTO] obfuscating kernel pointers Neil Horman
2010-11-12 17:39   ` Dan Rosenberg
2010-11-12 18:54     ` Neil Horman
2010-11-12 19:03       ` Dan Rosenberg
2010-11-15  8:43 ` Tomas Mraz
2010-11-15 11:21   ` Neil Horman
2010-11-15 11:58   ` Herbert Xu
2010-11-15 12:06     ` Tomas Mraz

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