Re: [RFC] prevention of syscalls from writable segments, breaking bug exploits

[Steven Walter <srwalter@yahoo.com>]

On Wed, Jan 03, 2001 at 04:54:38PM -0500, Alexander Viro wrote:
> On Wed, 3 Jan 2001, Dan Aloni wrote:
> 
> > It is known that most remote exploits use the fact that stacks are
> > executable (in i386, at least).
> > 
> > On Linux, they use INT 80 system calls to execute functions in the kernel
> > as root, when the stack is smashed as a result of a buffer overflow bug in
> > various server software.
> > 
> > This preliminary, small patch prevents execution of system calls which
> > were executed from a writable segment. It was tested and seems to work,
> > without breaking anything. It also reports of such calls by using printk.
> 
> Get real. Attacker can set whatever registers he needs and jump to one
> of the many instances of int 0x80 in libc. There goes your protection.
> 
> Win: 0
> Loss: cost of find_vma() (and down(&mm->mmap_sem), BTW) on every system
> call.
> 
> And the reason to apply that patch would be...?

Should be a moot point, anyway, as x86 has a seperate stack for each
priviledge level.  Even if the kernel somehow tried to execute code in a
lower priviledge segment (stack or otherwise) shouldn't a GPF get
generated?
-- 
-Steven
"Voters decide nothing.  Vote counters decide everything."
				-Joseph Stalin
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