Az OpenBSD atyja, Theo de Raadt bejelentette, hogy az OpenBSD újabb biztonságot erősítő funkciókkal gyarapodott. Ezek a biztonsági funkciók amellett, hogy erősítik a rendszer alapbiztonságát, még el is veszik a kedvét az átlagos, puffer túlcsordítással manipuláló támadónak. A funkcióbővítések része a POSIX PROT_EXEC direktíva implementálása, amely biztosítja, hogy az oldalakat (pages) ne lehessen egy időben írni és végrehajtani a memóriában, és megjelent a propolice, amely nehezebbé teszi, hogy a puffer változók tulcsordulhassanak.
Theo de Raadt levele:From: deraadt@cvs.openbsd.org (Theo de Raadt)
Newsgroups: mailing.openbsd.tech
Subject: recent security changes in openbsd
Date: Thu, 30 Jan 2003 09:08:33 +0000 (UTC)
In the last while, a couple of people in OpenBSD have been putting some buffer overflow "solutions" into our source tree; under my continual prodding. I thought I would summarize some of these and how they fit together, since what I have seen written up so far has been wildly inaccurate. (Bad reporter, no cookie).
These are, in short form:
1) PROT_* purity
2) W^X
3) .rodata
4) propolice
Let me start at the top then.
1) PROT_* purity
POSIX systems have three permissions for each page.
PROT_READ
PROT_WRITE
PROT_EXEC
To control the behaviour of a page, one or's these values together. Unfortunately, as you can see from mprotect(2):
The mprotect() system call changes the specified pages to have protection prot. Not all implementations will guarantee protection on a page basis; the granularity of protection changes may be as large as an entire region. This might not be true on a page. All real Unix systems I know of support PROT_READ and PROT_WRITE correctly, but PROT_EXEC has largely been implied as soon as you ask for PROT_READ.
This is because the pmap modules have been poorly written, or because the mmu's in question are not fully capable. This change makes a best effort based on the MMU in question to enforce PROT_EXEC as an independent flag.
BEFORE AFTER
sparc nope fully correct
sparc64 nope fully correct
alpha nope fully correct
vax nope impossible
m68k nope impossible
hppa nope fully correct
i386 nope see Note 1
powerpc nope see Note 2
Oh oh. i386 and powerpc, two very common architecures, have ominous notes. Now you guys know why I want fast sparc64 machines to run.
Note 1)
The i386 is not capable of doing per-page execute permission. At most it is only capable of drawing a line through the address space, by limiting the code segment length (using the code segment register). So we can say, "from 0 to this point is executable" and "from that point on to the end of userland is not executable". This sucks, but it is the best we can currently do. We can protect the stack, and not much else.
There are a lot of other i386 details that are interesting to some of us, but you don't want to know them. Anyways we are investigating some possible changes that might help us protect more.
By the way, hammer will not have this problem...
Note 2)
The powerpc has a slightly more flexible mechanism than the i386, but let me just say it still totally sucks. We can protect
the stack, and not much else.
So what we did here is to make a best effort solution at making the stack non-executable on most architectures. On many others, we have also made the data and bss segments non-executable.
In other words, the VM system needed slight tracks to correct the tracking of PROT_EXEC more carefully, and then the pmap modules in each architecture was modified to take a `best effort' approach towards making PROT_EXEC an independent flag.
2) W^X.
W^X is a short form for "PROT_WRITE XOR PROT_EXEC". The basic idea here is that most buffer overflow "eggs" rely on a particular feature: That there is memory which they can write to, and then jump to.
What if there was no such memory? Does a normal Unix process have memory that is both writeable and executable? Turns out they do: In particular, (ELF) shared library programs have these two segments called GOT and PLT that are (depending on which architecture) normally part of the text or data segment. They are overwritten at times.
But do they need it? The change that has been made is to put the GOT and PLT into their own segments. The main goal of course, is to try to ensure that at any time, no page in the system is both writeable and executable.
We managed to get it working. The attackers just lost a place to put their buffer overflow egg. On architectures where goal (1) is fully working, that is...
3) .rodata
Now there is another problem. The code segment of a program, called the text segment, has two parts in it on most systems: real code, and read-only data. Historically a.out only had text, data and bss segments, and it appears that when people moved to ELF they basically just didn't use any new features that ELF has. We've finally now moved to a seperate .rodata segment. Unlike the real text segment which is PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, this new segment is only PROT_READ.
What difference does this make? Well, if you manage to find some data in a program that looks like instructions you might want to run from your exploit, you can no longer do that. This may sound like a minor chance (but there are also cache and performance reasons too ;-)
4) Propolice
Propolice is, as I like say describe it, "Stackgaurd on steriods". Stackgaurd uses a random canary (random value constant per run) placed by the function prologue and checked by the function epilogues to ensure the return address has not been moved. It was i386 only code. Propolice is machine independent, running on most of our architectures. As well, Propolice rearranges variables inside a stack frame so that the ones most likely to overflow (ie buffers) are closest to the canary, thereby making it hard to overwrite pointers or
regular integers (which it moves down).
We feel that these 4 technologies together will be a a royal pain in the ass for the typical buffer overflow attacker.
We'll be writing a real paper about all of this later, but perhaps now people will understand why we are excited about 3.4.
