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Execmod and SE Linux – i386 Must Die

I have previously written about the execmod permission check in SE Linux [1] and in a post about SE Linux on the desktop I linked to some bug reports about it [2] (which probably won’t be fixed in Debian).

One thing I didn’t mention is the proof of the implication of this. When running a program in the unconfined_t domain on a SE Linux system (the domain for login sessions on a default configuration), if you set the boolean allow_execmod then the following four tests from paxtest will be listed as vulnerable:

Executable bss (mprotect)
Executable data (mprotect)
Executable shared library bss (mprotect)
Executable shared library data (mprotect)

This means that if you have a single shared object which uses text relocations and therefore needs the execmod permission then the range of possible vectors for attack against bugs in the application has just increased by four. This doesn’t necessarily require that the library in question is actually being used either! If a program is linked against many shared objects that it might use, then even if it is not going to ever use the library in question it will still need execmod access to start and thus give extra possibilities to the attacker.

For reference when comparing a Debian system that doesn’t run SE Linux (or has SE Linux in permissive mode) to a SE Linux system with execmod enabled the following tests fail (are reported as vulnerable):

Executable anonymous mapping (mprotect)
Executable heap (mprotect)
Executable stack (mprotect)
Writable text segments

If you set the booleans allow_execstack and allow_execheap then you lose those protections. But if you use the default settings of all three booleans then a program running in the unconfined_t domain will be protected against 8 different memory based attacks.

Based on discussions with other programmers I get the impression that fixing all the execmod issues on i386 is not going to be possible. The desire for a 15% performance boost (the expected result of using an extra register) is greater than the desire for secure systems among the people who matter most (the developers).

Of course we could solve some of these issues by using statically linked programs and have statically linked versions of the libraries in question which can use the extra register without any issues. This does of course mean that updates to the libraries (including security updates) will require rebuilding the statically linked applications in question – if a rebuild was missed then this could be reduce the security of the system.

To totally resolve that issue we need to have i386 machines (the cause of the problem due to their lack of registers) go away. Fortunately in the mainstream server, desktop, and laptop markets that is already pretty much done. I’m still running a bunch of P3 servers (and I know many other people who have similar servers), but they are not used for tasks that involve running programs that are partially written in assembly code (mplayer etc).

One problem is that there are still new machines being released with the i386 ISA as the only instruction set. For example the AMD Geode CPU [2] is used by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project [3] and the new Intel Atom line of CPUs [4] apparently only supports the AMD64 ISA on the “desktop” models and the versions used in ultra-mobile PCs are i386 only.

I think that these issues are particularly difficult in regard to the OLPC. It’s usually not difficult to run “yum upgrade” or “apt-get dist-upgrade” on an EeePC or similar ultra-mobile PC. But getting an OLPC machine upgraded in some of the remote places where they may be deployed might be more difficult. Past experience has shown that viruses and trojans can get to machines that are supposed to be on isolated networks, so it seems that malware can get access to machines that can not communicate with servers that contain security patches… One mitigating factor however is that the OLPC OS is based on Fedora, and Fedora seems to be taking the strongest efforts to improve security of any mainstream distribution, a choice between 15% performance and security seems to be a no-brainer for the Fedora developers.

1 comment to Execmod and SE Linux – i386 Must Die

  • Anonymous

    Does this issue of text relocations and an extra register relate to the similar issue faced by Xen? Or rather, could the same fix address both problems, so that if you need to give up a register to solve one problem you don’t need to give up a second register to solve the other problem?