Re: [PATCH 3/3] x86: kernel base offset ASLR

[H. Peter Anvin]

It seems to me that you are assuming that the attacker is targeting a specific system, but a bot might as well target 256 different systems and see what sticks...

Kees Cook <keescook@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 1:12 PM, H. Peter Anvin <hpa@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On 04/04/2013 01:07 PM, Kees Cook wrote:
>>> However, the benefits of
>>> this feature in certain environments exceed the perceived
>weaknesses[2].
>>
>> Could you clarify?
>
>I would summarize the discussion of KASLR weaknesses into to two
>general observations:
>1- it depends on address location secrecy and leaks are common/easy.
>2- it has low entropy so attack success rates may be high.
>
>For "1", as Julien mentions, remote attacks and attacks from a
>significantly contained process (via seccomp-bpf) minimizes the leak
>exposure. For local attacks, cache timing attacks and other things
>also exist, but the ASLR can be improved to defend against that too.
>So, KASLR is useful on systems that are virtualization hosts,
>providing remote services, or running locally confined processes.
>
>For "2", I think that the comparison to userspace ASLR entropy isn't
>as direct. For userspace, most systems don't tend to have any kind of
>watchdog on segfaulting processes, so a remote attacker could just
>keep trying an attack until they got lucky, in which case low entropy
>is a serious problem. In the case of KASLR, a single attack failure
>means the system goes down, which makes mounting an attack much more
>difficult. I think 8 bits is fine to start with, and I think start
>with a base offset ASLR is a good first step. We can improve things in
>the future.
>
>-Kees
>
>--
>Kees Cook
>Chrome OS Security

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