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arXiv · 1903.04654

Fast Intra-kernel Isolation and Security with IskiOS

Spyridoula Gravani·Mohammad Hedayati·John Criswell·Michael L. Scott
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Abstract

The kernels of operating systems such as Windows, Linux, and MacOS are vulnerable to control-flow hijacking. Defenses exist, but many require efficient intra-address-space isolation. Execute-only memory, for example, requires read protection on code segments, and shadow stacks require protection from buffer overwrites. Intel's Protection Keys for Userspace (PKU) could, in principle, provide the intra-kernel isolation needed by such defenses, but, when used as designed, it applies only to user-mode application code. This paper presents an unconventional approach to memory protection, allowing PKU to be used within the operating system kernel on existing Intel hardware, replacing the traditional user/supervisor isolation mechanism and, simultaneously, enabling efficient intra-kernel isolation. We call the resulting mechanism Protection Keys for Kernelspace (PKK). To demonstrate its utility and efficiency, we present a system we call IskiOS: a Linux variant featuring execute-only memory (XOM) and the first-ever race-free shadow stacks for x86-64. Experiments with the LMBench kernel microbenchmarks display a geometric mean overhead of about 11% for PKK and no additional overhead for XOM. IskiOS's shadow stacks bring the total to 22%. For full applications, experiments with the system benchmarks of the Phoronix test suite display negligible overhead for PKK and XOM, and less than 5% geometric mean overhead for shadow stacks.

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Spyridoula Gravani, Mohammad Hedayati, John Criswell, Michael L. Scott. 2019-03-11. Fast Intra-kernel Isolation and Security with IskiOS. https://doi.org/10.1145/3471621.3471849

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