Home / vulnerabilities AMD Bulldozer Linux ASLR Weakness
Posted on 22 April 2015
Source : packetstormsecurity.org Link
A security issue in Linux ASLR implementation which affects some AMD processors
has been found. The issue affects to all Linux process even if they are not
using shared libraries (statically compiled).
The problem appears because some mmapped objects (VDSO, libraries, etc.) are
poorly randomized in an attempt to avoid cache aliasing penalties for AMD
Bulldozer (Family 15h) processors.
Affected systems have reduced the mmapped files entropy by eight. Grsecurity/PaX
is also affected.
The total entropy for the VVAR/VDSO, mmapped files and libraries of a processes
are reduced by eight. The number of possible locations where the mapped areas
can be placed are reduced by 87.5%.
On 32-bit systems, for example, the entropy for libraries is reduced from 2^8 to
2^5, which means that libraries only have 32 different places where they can be
loaded. Under this scenario, advanced techniques used by PaX to thwart brute
force attacks (for example, force a delay on the process creation when a crash
occurs) are no longer effective. The attackers need on average only 16 trials.
Advisory details at:
http://hmarco.org/bugs/AMD-Bulldozer-linux-ASLR-weakness-reducing-mmaped-files-by-eight.html
We sent a patch, and Linux 4.1 Will Improve AMD Bulldozer's ASLR Entropy Issue:
http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-tip-commits/msg27373.html
--
Hector Marco-Gisbert @ http://hmarco.org/
Cyber Security Researcher @ http://cybersecurity.upv.es
Universitat Politècnica de València (Spain)
