Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [TECH TOPIC] Kernel Hardening

[josh@joshtriplett.org]

On Mon, Aug 31, 2015 at 03:10:01PM -0500, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> Greg KH <greg@kroah.com> writes:
> 
> > On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 12:00:15PM -0700, Kees Cook wrote:
> >> On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 11:52 AM, Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> wrote:
> >> > On Mon, 24 Aug 2015, Kees Cook wrote:
> >> >> On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 4:56 AM, James Morris <jmorris@namei.org> wrote:
> >> >> This is far from a comprehensive list, though. The biggest value, I
> >> >> think, would be in using KERNEXEC, UDEREF, USERCOPY, and the plugins
> >> >> for constification and integer overflow.
> >> >
> >> > There is another aspect. We need to make developers more aware of the
> >> > potential attack issues. I learned my lesson with the futex disaster
> >> > and since then I certainly look with a different set of eyes at user
> >> > space facing code. I doubt that we want that everyone experiences the
> >> > disaster himself (though that's a very enlightening experience), but
> >> > we should try to document incidents and the lessons learned from
> >> > them. Right now we just rely on those who are deep into the security
> >> > realm or the few people who learned it the hard way.
> >> 
> >> Yeah, it can be a hard perspective shift to make. And shifting the
> >> thinking about the kernel itself to always operating in a compromised
> >> state makes thinking about how to protect it much easier. User space
> >> is trying to hurt us! :)
> >
> > Microsoft's security team, which was responsible for forcing all of
> > their developers to undergo some security training every year, has
> > boiled it all down to these simple 4 words:
> >
> > 	All input is evil.
> 
> I have a linux version of that one.
> 
> An unprivileged user can call that.
> 
> It is absolutely amazing how much kernel code does not worry
> about evil input after it checks that the caller is root.

Another that has only started getting consideration recently: relative to the
kernel, root has less privilege.

- Josh Triplett