Can I read DangZero: Efficient Use-After-Free Detection via Direct Page Table Access on EtoBox?

DangZero: Efficient Use-After-Free Detection via Direct Page Table Access by Floris Gorter; Koen Koning; Herbert Bos; Cristiano Giuffrida is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

What is DangZero: Efficient Use-After-Free Detection via Direct Page Table Access about?

Use-after-free vulnerabilities remain difficult to detect and mitigate, making them a popular source of exploitation. Existing solutions incur impractical performance/memory overhead, require specialized hardware, and/or guarantee only protection, but not detection.In this paper, we propose DangZero, a new solution to detect use-after-free vulnerabilities as they occur. DangZero builds on a traditional page protection and aliasing scheme, where objects are made inaccessible after a free, and subsequent accesses are immediately detected. In contrast to prior solutions using alias-based detection, DangZero relies on direct page table access in ring 0 to provide a much more efficient implementation. The key idea is that, by giving the program's allocator direct access to the page tables, we can efficiently manage and invalidate vulnerable objects. To safely implement this, we build upon a unikernel-like design, where virtualization provides ring-0 (guest-mode) access, isolation, as well as compatibility with existing Linux programs. Moreover, we show direct page table access serves as an efficient building block for garbage collection-style alias reclaiming. Doing so provides the abil

Author

Floris Gorter; Koen Koning; Herbert Bos; Cristiano Giuffrida

Publisher

ACM

Published

2022

Language

EN