Hi!
> Introduction
> ============
>
> Dynamic code is used in many different user applications. Dynamic code is
> often generated at runtime. Dynamic code can also just be a pre-defined
> sequence of machine instructions in a data buffer. Examples of dynamic
> code are trampolines, JIT code, DBT code, etc.
>
> Dynamic code is placed either in a data page or in a stack page. In order
> to execute dynamic code, the page it resides in needs to be mapped with
> execute permissions. Writable pages with execute permissions provide an
> attack surface for hackers. Attackers can use this to inject malicious
> code, modify existing code or do other harm.
>
> To mitigate this, LSMs such as SELinux implement W^X. That is, they may not
> allow pages to have both write and execute permissions. This prevents
> dynamic code from executing and blocks applications that use it. To allow
> genuine applications to run, exceptions have to be made for them (by setting
> execmem, etc) which opens the door to security issues.
>
> The W^X implementation today is not complete. There exist many user level
> tricks that can be used to load and execute dynamic code. E.g.,
>
> - Load the code into a file and map the file with R-X.
>
> - Load the code in an RW- page. Change the permissions to R--. Then,
> change the permissions to R-X.
>
> - Load the code in an RW- page. Remap the page with R-X to get a separate
> mapping to the same underlying physical page.
>
> IMO, these are all security holes as an attacker can exploit them to inject
> his own code.
IMO, you are smoking crack^H^H very seriously misunderstanding what
W^X is supposed to protect from.
W^X is not supposed to protect you from attackers that can already do
system calls. So loading code into a file then mapping the file as R-X
is in no way security hole in W^X.
If you want to provide protection from attackers that _can_ do system
calls, fine, but please don't talk about W^X and please specify what
types of attacks you want to prevent and why that's good thing.
Hint: attacker that can "Load the code into a file and map the file
with R-X." can probably also load the code into /foo and
os.system("/usr/bin/python /foo").
This is not first crazy patch from your company. Perhaps you should
have a person with strong Unix/Linux experience performing "straight
face test" on outgoing patches?
Best regards,
Pavel
--
(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html
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