Earlier this year I pushed a small library to Github called Map Guard. The goal of Map Guard is to enforce non-invasive security policies with regards to how pages of memory may be allocated, or modified, with the mmap syscall. For example, we may want to deny any page allocations marked Read, Write, and Execute as it introduces an easy mechanism for an exploit developer to take advantage of. In the rest of this post I will break down the approach I took to implement each of these security policies, and finally how Map Guard uses Intel’s Memory Protection Keys to allow transparently enabling Execute Only memory for all regions of mapped code.

source: grugq

Control Flow Integrity is an exploit mitigation that helps raise the cost of writing reliable exploits for memory safety vulnerabilities. There are various CFI schemes available today, and most are quite well documented and understood. One of the important areas where CFI can be improved is protecting indirect calls across DSO (Dynamic Shared Object) boundaries. This is a difficult problem to solve as only the library itself can validate call targets and consumers of the library may be compiled and linked against the library long after it was built. This requires a low level ABI compatability between the caller and the callee. The LLVM project has documented their design for this here. The remainder of this post looks at that design, it’s drawbacks, and then briefly explores how the Android PIE Bionic linker implements it.

source: L

PatitionAlloc is no longer used to allocate memory for DOM related C++ objects in Chrome. Instead a new garbage collected memory allocator, Oilpan, is used. Oilpan is a different design with its own tradeoffs that optimize for performance. But those tradeoffs can introduce opportunity for an exploit developer. This post is about some of those design decisions that resulted in a lack of exploit mitigations traditonally found in more mature memory allocators.