Gentoo Archives: gentoo-hardened

From: Andrew Savchenko <bircoph@g.o>
To: gentoo-hardened@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-hardened] Any hardened features to protect from CVE-2016–5195 like vulnerabilities?
Date: Mon, 05 Dec 2016 06:40:09
Message-Id: 20161205093944.3b50d77d809f45331dca1799@gentoo.org
1 Hi all,
2
3 I'd like to know is there any way to protect from kernel
4 vulnerabilities like CVE-2016–5195 (mad COW) using hardened
5 technologies. (I'm not talking about how to fix this exact CVE, but
6 how to protect from similar failures in future.)
7
8 Based on exploit published I can think of the following approaches:
9
10 1) Exploit runs enormous amounts of madvise() calls, any way to
11 rate limit it or block after some threshold is reached? I doubt
12 there is any legitimate use case for calling madvise() that often.
13
14 2) Exploits uses huge rate of write() calls and most the fails due
15 to access restrictions. This is definitely suspicious. Can such
16 behaviour be spotted and blocked by some security feature?
17
18 3) Can some hardware features like Intel TSX be used to protect
19 from such race conditions?
20
21 Best regards,
22 Andrew Savchenko

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