On Thu, Jun 22, 2017 at 6:50 PM, Kees Cook <keescook@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > This SLUB free list pointer obfuscation code is modified from Brad > Spengler/PaX Team's code in the last public patch of grsecurity/PaX based > on my understanding of the code. Changes or omissions from the original > code are mine and don't reflect the original grsecurity/PaX code. > > This adds a per-cache random value to SLUB caches that is XORed with > their freelist pointers. This adds nearly zero overhead and frustrates the > very common heap overflow exploitation method of overwriting freelist > pointers. A recent example of the attack is written up here: > http://cyseclabs.com/blog/cve-2016-6187-heap-off-by-one-exploit BTW, to quantify "nearly zero overhead", I ran multiple 200-run cycles of "hackbench -g 20 -l 1000", and saw: before: mean 10.11882499999999999995 variance .03320378329145728642 stdev .18221905304181911048 after: mean 10.12654000000000000014 variance .04700556623115577889 stdev .21680767106160192064 The difference gets lost in the noise, but if the above is sensible, it's 0.07% slower. ;) -Kees -- Kees Cook Pixel Security -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx"> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>